This posts observation have interesting side-effects. Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work. And hierarchies and the fear of embarrassment do too. So, the more you try to force "excellence" into existence via external pressures and resource tracking, the more it disappears.
Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.
Or in a truly low-trust society, where you are part the kleptocrat chieftain system and you just use your take to do this kind of work. The classic MBA process will totally destroy any scientific or creative institution.
Graffiti on a bathroom stall is the purest form of art as it is not done for acclaim or monetary reward ... as the joke goes.
But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the understanding that they should not be prescriptive.
We're going to have to collect data on the ratio of bathroom graffiti between tags and limericks. Anecdotally, where I live a it's mostly silly goosery.
Just to be totally clear, here is an example. Please cover up my user name for an authentic experience.
A dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Is nine squared, and not a bit more.
Interesting—this feels like a very “engineering manager” sort of observation that isn’t actually all that generalizable.
My observation is that people share incredibly creative work all the time in all different sorts of societies. Humans are inherently creative beings, and we almost always find a way. Certainly a person needs _some_ resources (time, most importantly) in order to work creatively, but confidence in one’s abilities can and does regularly get the better of fear (e.g. that which can emerge from observation, measurement, hierarchies, etc.).
I can think of countless artists—writers, musicians, visual artists—who have succeeded in both doing & sharing “truly creative work” (however that’s defined) in the face of “success” & all of its concomitant challenges.
> Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work
No, not really. Broadly, it's not "measurements, metrics and surveillance" that kill creativity, it's the inability to make reasonable thresholds for failure. If the threshold is too low, one might never be able to get the critical mass of resources they need to achieve their task. If it's set too high, people will milk resources even when they have no creativity left to give to an unsolved problem.
I agree with your main points, but as I have both a BFA and an MBA I want to point out that the MBA focused very much on creating high-trust work environnments.
I think there must be a better label for the process that is destroying scientific and creative institutions.
Just an observation from a non-MBA. I feel that the MBA management class likes to create two class society where there is management class and a worker class. The management class has high trust amongst each other but no trust for the workers. The workers need to be controlled tightly and can’t be trusted. They are extremely reluctant to take feedback from the people who do the work. Better to pay consultants a lot of money. I have seen that in almost every larger company where I was employee or contractor.
That's why many universities declare in their charter that research doesn't have to be practical. The practicality of RSA asymmetric encryption only became practical with the advent of the internet ;)
> Fear of failure is a stumbling block for science. That's why many universities declare in their charter that research doesn't have to be practical.
No, universities do that because it's limiting to only focus on practical science, not because scientists are afraid to fail. Theoretical breakthroughs often find their use in practice with time.
Fear of failure is because we only put money on success, so researchers' livelihood, dignity and prestige depend on their research bearing fruit.
Nicely put. That's why most of the innovation over the centuries came from the high trust style societies.
With the decline of trust, I fear we as a civilization are going into a long period of stagnation or even regression. Unfortunately, at this point there's no socially acceptable way to reverse the trend of trust destruction.
I have often thought that there should be a public ledger of some sort for people (powered by vouching), and then immediately forseen the negative externalities and abandoned that idea.
Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain how.
No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it is to judge people by their popularity. Though it is far more expensive.
Popularity and reputation are not the exact same thing. Reputation is about trust and predictability, while popularity is about awareness of the person and/or their reputation.
But your points largely stands. However, reputation is one of many tools that can be used to assess the worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be given a relatively low weight compared to other tools. Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their reputation with effort.
When I first considered this in the late 90's I was inspired by Google's Page Rank algorithm, and wanted something akin to that for humans in a social network.
My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.
It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.
A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.
To bring the honor system back, we need to value honor again as a society. Doing honorable things should be compensated in some tangible way, as well as doing dishonorable things should be punished by society.
PS: I'm not talking about fake "honor" based power systems.
I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.
The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but cannot be wished away.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they have done more drone development in four years than the entire world together in forty.
> I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.
The class that brought most of the innovations, citizens of Rome or Athens, a privileged ruling class, had a strong in-group honor system. The rest of the society was not so, but they were so divided that those other parts didn't even count.
I always wonder how they justify stuff like that. What's the cost of producing those updates (including the opportunity cost of not doing something else) vs the value of the report?
> Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.
I don’t know about “high trust”, but I can say with confidence that the “make more mistakes” thesis misses a critical point: evolutionary winnowing isn’t so great if you’re one of the thousands of “adjacent” organisms that didn’t survive. Which, statistically, you will be. And the people who are trusted with resources and squander them without results will be less trusted in the future [1].
Point being, mistakes always have a cost, and while it can be smart to try to minimize that cost in certain scenarios (amateur painting), it can be a terrible idea in other contexts (open-heart surgery). Pick your optimization algorithm wisely.
What you’re characterizing as “low trust” is, in most cases, a system that isn’t trying to optimize for creativity, and that’s fine. You don’t want your bank to be “creative” with accounting, for example.
[1] Sort of. Unfortunately, humans gonna monkey, and the high-status monkeys get a lot of unfair credit for past successes, to the point of completely disregarding the true quality of their current work. So you see people who have lost literally billions of dollars in comically incompetent entrepreneurial disasters, only to be able to run out a year later and raise hundreds of millions more for a random idea.
I've never understood the "high-strust/low-trust" social dichotomy. I've never processed "society" as a single entity, but a large system with many independent aspects, and my levels of trust vary wildly across them and over time.
I'd also offer that there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work" but we often see the two as separate because we only have convenient access to one or the other.
5% of people create 90% of the crime. Double 5% to 10% and you double the crime. Make it 50% and and you 10x the crime.
You still have 50% of non-criminals but society with 50% criminals has way more crime than society with 5% criminals.
You might say high-crime society is much worse than low-crime society even though they both have individuals that are criminals and non-criminals.
Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society. They both have individuals with various levels of trust, but emergent behavior driven by statistics creates a very different society.
> there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work"
To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
Also I don't see you're bringing the "true scottsman" judgement here. What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work. Who gets to decide what is "truly creative" vs. merely "creative".
> Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society.
We already have "high-crime society" and "low-crime society." What this has to do with overall levels of trust in different parts of the system, say, education, is not immediately clear to me. Do all high crime societies have untrustworthy education systems as well?
> To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
To make my intention clear, the other difference is "popularity," which exemplifies the precise confusion I was reacting to.
> What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work.
I didn't invoke it. The GP did. I'm willing to admit to whatever their subjective judgement is. I wonder if their connection between trust and "true creativity" is valid regardless of any possible definition. My gambit above was to openly suppose a good faith reason for the difference in my point of view.
I think you gotta define where you're drawing the box. Depending on the context, "society" might be your nation, your office, or just a 1:1 relationship with your coworker.
That indicates that you live in a relatively high-trust society. Obviously there is a spectrum and aspects, but they tend to correlate.
I don't know of any real-world society that would be very high-trust in one regard (say, keeping their doors unlocked), but very low-trust in another (say, routinely poisoning their spices with lead to make them look more appealing - yes, this happens [0]).
Have you not been to any so called low trust country? The difference is quite apparent in how people regard each other. With your alias, parts of Italy would qualify.
recently execs in companies think software dev isnt creative work because llm can churn out equivalents.
So they are openly tracking all sorts of metrics on devs now.
I find that restrictions not only don't kill creative work, they enable it. Measuring anything makes you consider constraints, which helps foster better creativity - at least for me, and I see the same in others as well.
Restrictions have dimensions. I have enjoyed working in highly cooperative situations where we had restrictions of resources and rules but no restrictions in terms of allowing us to find solutions. Infact those solutions were celebrated by my manager who had to work within the confines of rules and resources defined for him. It was great fun.
Fear of observation is highly correlated with neuroticism. Creativity, on the other hand, is a component of openness which is highly correlated with intelligence. The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism, which simultaneously are the people least concerned by impacts of increased observation.
Furthermore, high trust social environments only contribute to the degree of disclosure, not creativity. In low trust social environments creative people remain equally creative but either do not openly expose their creative output or do so secretly for subversive purposes.
This feels like it's conflating a couple of different things.
Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors- Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes, since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most creative people" though.
Secondly, I'd push back that people low in neuroticism would be "least concerned by" surveillance. While strictly technically true, that's not a helpful framing, as it seemingly implies surveillance would have a negligible negative impact for people low in neuroticism. If that's what you're implying, I'd like to see references.
I'm not able to comment at all on the conclusing about "degree of disclosure" being moderated by trust level in social environment, especially how "creative people remain equally creative but do not openly expose their creative output". If true, this implies that trust in society doesn't impact primary (unshared) creative output at all- that's a very strong claim in my opinion. I'd very much like references on this.
> Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness.
I never claimed this and I have no idea why you would think I did.
What I do know is that nearly 1 in 3 JavaScript developers, based upon large anonymous polls, self identify as autistic. If that is representative of software employment as a whole then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people at levels far exceeding the outside population. Everybody wants to think they are more awesome, creative, and highly intelligent compared to everybody else, but that is numerically irrational.
Low neurotic people are generally less scared of just about everything including third party observation. Less fear and less anxiety is the very definition of low neuroticism.
> The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism
You did claim this.
> self identify as autistic. (...) then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people
This is hateful and wrong. Autistic people aren't necessarily self indulgent, and not self evidently neurotic, though it happens to be the case that autistic people have a higher incidence of neuroticism, which is partially due to people describing them, for example, as "self indulgent".
You've shifted your claims, you're not supporting your claims by either argument or reference, and you've added hateful rhetoric. This is very regrettable.
You need to get over yourself. Autism is a medical diagnosis. If things like medicine and psychology and not reading people's comments correctly makes you sad then it does not matter what the comments actually say.
And yes, many autistic people, though not all, are exceptionally self-indulgent, which just literally means self-preference. Its a problem of less developed introspection which parallels a less developed interpretation of social intelligence.
I have not shifted my claims. I originally said people with fear of observation, a trait of high neuroticism, is a major constraint of many things including creativity. I also said creativity is an aspect of high openness, which is closely correlated to high intelligence. I never said neuroticism is in any correlated, either positively or negatively, to either openness or intelligence. I think you have trouble with bias, as in you want statements to imply something not stated.
I teach at an art university for 8 years now. I would highly doubt that: The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism.
In my experience that isn't the complete picture. I have met highly creative people who are extremely (unhealthy so) concerned with what others think, yet go their own path anyways. It is true that creative people often tend to do things in a way that appears as if it is outside of the frame of normal parameters. But this isn't so simple either, because maybe it is context dependent. A punk musician may live in disregard of the aesthetical conventions of society, but they also may have a traded canon of styles and works their own subculture. So maybe that punk doesn't care what society thinks about them, but they may care about what other punks think.
My experience with hundreds of art students is that there is no correlation between how independent someone works and how creative their output is. There are many ways of producing interesting ideas and the lone (usually: male) genius being the only true way is by this point a well-refuted idea.
I think the idea that one must be naturally impervious to shame to be "the right sort" of creative is attractive, but it's used to disregard the courage necessary to show oneself and open up in the way that builds the creator.
Lots of amazing artists, creators and researchers are obviously highly neurotic.
I did not base my comment on personal observations. It comes straight from psychology and the big 5.
I was also once an art student myself. Creativity extends far beyond individual contributions, which becomes evident in resource and personnel management. Creativity is highly correlated to openness, as is intelligence, and is least restricted by those who are most eager to exercise decisions and try new things without fear of consequence, whether real or perceived.
Openness is on the closed minded-openness axis. Neuroticism is on the neurotic-stable axis. These are independent things. You can be highly open-minded and highly neurotic. I’d seriously question your understanding of the Big 5.
Can't vouch for the accuracy of these descriptions but they don't suggest lack of neuroticism however brought on. Bodily dysfunction of whatever kind can be causative of course.
For more than 20 years, Mr. Let’s Paint TV (artist John Kilduff) has encouraged viewers to “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery. Just do the thing.
I couldn’t agree more with that impulse and TFA’s: the common trait that cuts across all the most impressive people I know—from artists to businesspeople to scientists to engineers to even leaders-of-organizations—is a cheerful unselfconsciousness, a humility, a willful simplicity—a willingness to put it out there while it’s raw and stupid and unformed, and hone it through practice with the people around them.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass
Once you realize your mistake, and only do it once or twice more times in your life, often when stressed or some other external stressor causes you to not follow your hunch.
> Some of the best research ... has come from surprisingly young people. ... They're not afraid of looking stupid.
Young people aren't doing things without worrying about looking stupid, they just don't know that they look stupid. I say that as a former young person who was way more naive than I thought I was at the time. This is good and bad.
Also I think this point ignores that as people grow in their careers they often become more highly leveraged. I've moved from writing code to coaching others who write code. It is very normal for much of the "important" stuff to be done by relatively young people, but this understates the influence from more experienced people.
There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid. If you're the senior subject matter expert and get a question you can't answer, people still expect you to make an educated guess. The junior guy they expect to ask someone.
> There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid.
Also also they tend to be less financially "tethered" for want of a better word - mortgages, families, children, etc. - which makes it easier for them to be risky (consciously or not) about what/who/where they work on/with.
Probably not likely to be jumping from your stable 9/5 to a startup when you've got your semi-detached with 4 kids.
This was on a poster in my 8th grade English teacher’s class:
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not know and does not ask remains a fool forever.”
Becoming proficient enough in my professional life such that I no longer felt anxiety about admitting what I did not know through asking questions was a massive achievement. Fortunately, I learned that lesson well and started applying it everywhere, not just in my work.
Successful professor with a very theoretical (as opposed to empirical) research trajectory here: this feels extremely accurate to me.
I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.
I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong, fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being wrong.
This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps not!
Willingness to look stupid and intellectual self-confidence are two sides of the same coin.
If you can find internal (rather than external) reasons to trust/believe in your own intelligence and capabilities, it makes it easier to be willing to look foolish. Also, a lack of knowledge/ability in a new area (or even a familiar area) is not a sign of a lack of capability. There's a difference between being a novice and being an idiot. So long as your source of intellectual self-confidence is strong enough (say, you have made great intellectual achievements in some other area of your life unrelated to the thing you're struggling with right now) its irrelevant if other people think you the fool: they're simply mistaken, and that's no skin off your back.
Someone (supposedly) published da Vinci's to do list a while back, and from the snippets I read he seemed to spend most of his time talking to experts about subjects he didn't know much about. Pretty telling if true.
Plot twist: anything original will look stupid, until some cultural event makes the original thing the new "way," then all the small minds will act like that was the only way the thing should have been done all along.
"The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society and human nature than people realize.
Clearly not true, lots of original things that instead looks like "Ah yeah, obviously, duh!" once they're public, rather than looking stupid. Browsers/WWW, the iPhone and putting wheels on suitcases are things that come into mind that the amount of people thought "looked stupid" was very low, and they became very popular relatively quickly.
Those things are all incremental improvements based on existing patterns that people were familiar with. Also, Apple is the king of "no clothes". People shill Apple products even when they suck.
Look at Vincent Van Gogh's art. He didn't sell shit except to his own brother in life, people hated it. Fast forward to now and his art is among the most valuable in the world, and people consider him one of the greatest geniuses of all time.
How is one person's art not just incremental improvement on other's art? I expected some actually insightful answer, not just "Person Bs media creation was better than Person's A media", does that really count as "truly original" in your mind here? Yet browsers/WWW was just an incremental improvement? I'm sorry but I'm really confused now, sounds like we're really talking past each other here.
Browsers are just better gopher. If the WWW hadn't existed, we'd have xGopher 8.0 NG and our user experience would be mostly the same. Evolutionary pressures drive convergent evolution to stable solutions. We're on a technological gradient, and these things are incremental jumps driven by common human need (otherwise they wouldn't gain traction).
Creativity at the deepest level is seeing the cultural slope you're doing gradient descent on, and taking a hard left through the trees to a hidden slope that's way better rather than the one you were on.
I like Van Gogh as an example because of how hard he failed and the cultural U-turn, but hostility towards things that challenge the entrenched paradigm is a common response. Maybe Einstein and relativity is a more relevant example for you. People didn't read it at first and nod their heads, thinking to themselves "yes, of course!"
I got a pair of airpod clones on a whim (they were only $20 in the impulse buy section). Sure, they have less cable, but keeping them charged is very annoying, especially if wearing them for a long stretch of time. The charging contacts also tend to oxidize and not make good contact, but that's probably because they're a cheap clone. I find wired earphones are more convenient for long stretches because they draw power from my phone. I also know the wired earphones don't broadcast a tracking signal.
It's easy to look stupid with no one around (editing your own writing), or with someone you trust deeply (choosing what to put on a cake with a friend), or if you're a jellyfish apparently. Those are spaces with people, or jellyfish, who you trust.
What's much, much harder is being willing to look stupid in front of people who have an interest in proving your competence (e.g. a manager or a customer) or who would be willing to hold it against you in the future (competitors, and jellyfish probably).
Being OK with taking a personal knock by asking a question that might set you back but that moves everyone else forward is a superpower. If you can build enough resilience to be the person in the room who asks the question everyone else is probably wondering about, even if it makes you look bad, eventually leads to becoming a useful person to have around. That should always be the goal.
It is sort of funny to think of Nobel prize level work in relation to blogposting. A couple of examples that don't conform: Marie Curie won another prize. Josephson in general (check him out). Feynman did greatly contribute to other fields after his prize. You can find as many counterexamples as examples if you dig a bit. I've witnessed a few times that looking like an idiot is the least of their concern.
I'm not sure this is the same thing but I waffle between wanting to not look stupid and also not wanting others to think I'm not trying hard enough.
Let's say there is something I need to do at work. I could read docs in the company internal site. I could read the code. Maybe the thing I need to do is figure out why a test is failing. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the code. It's possible it's failing because there is a bug in the test. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the CI/CQ. It's possible it's failing because some other dependency changed something.
The question is, when do I keep digging on my own vs ask for guidance and how much guidance? I never have a good feeling for that. I kind of wish the guidance was offered or encouraged as "I know you're not familiar with this stuff so let me walk you through this issue and then hopefully you can do it on your own the next time". But, I never know. I feel compelled to try to work it out on my own. Some of that is ego, like I can't do it on my own I must not be as good as others on my team. But I have no idea how much they asked vs figured out.
A few times when I do get guidance it's not enough. the person giving it isn't aware of all the hidden knowledge that's helping them figure out the issue and therefore doesn't pass it on.
As a mentor, I like to set explicit expectations for how much time someone should spend digging before asking for help, and I encourage others to do the same.
For an intern or new grad whose information gathering skills likely have gaps they don't even know about, I'll tell them to come check with me if they're completely blocked and haven't made progress for an hour, as it's frequently a small pointer or hint from me that can get them back on track. As they get more more knowledge about the systems and experience unblocking themselves, this grows to half a day, a day, and more from there.
The same applies even for experienced engineers who are new to the team, though the timeboxes grow much faster. There will always be little things to learn, and there's no point burning a day of chasing threads if it's some quirk in the system you just happen to not be aware of.
Let me add a nuance to this after seeing the replies. I've got 40years of experience. I'm not an intern. I still feel this. Just because I could write Linux, Photoshop, or Unreal Engine from scratch doesn't mean I know my particular company's massive infrastructure or their million file code base.
As an intern I feel the same everyday. It feels more natural to me to just keep digging into the codebase until I figure something out instead of asking for help.
Part of it is what you mentioned, as well as the fact that I sometimes feel bad for "wasting" a much more productive engineer's time.
It's also not clear from the other side. Do you give a lot of guidance, so the intern becomes reliant on always having someone telling them what to do exactly on the micro level? Or let them work it out slowly, and during that process get familiar with the systems more closely? I find that having a clear task to solve actually gets me more of an understanding of how everything works, than reading a top-down documentation where I don't have any context of "why".
Also interns can differ a lot. They can need different levels of guidance and can come with widely different levels of prior experience, even in unrelated debugging and troubleshooting like fixing network ports for LAN gaming or whatever kids these days might be doing. Setting up VPN to evade geoblocking or whatever. Others may have no idea what to even do. And those who can do it may take widely different time.
I think an internship is, in fact, a good place to learn these meta-lessons too. You ask for some guidance, then you see it was maybe too much. Another time you don't and spend a lot of time, and have your supervising engineer say "oh I could have told you XYZ very quickly", then you update and recalibrate. There is no single short message that can convey this. That's why experience is valuable.
This foundational premise seems flawed. Surely there are pressures but it's a privilege hypothesis used to write the piece so the objection is important.
Once you achieve notoriety the world changes around you. Not only that but by the time achieve notoriety the world already changed around you. The lead time to novel prize is high.
Just to be concrete about one way the world changes is that you're no longer a great student with time to while away. Now everybody wants to congratulate you and learn your theory from you. They won't leave you the f** alone. When you were just some random promising grad student, you had mental quiet and peace. Academia, industries, responsibilities, they take that away.
And let's be fair, if you've done Nobel worthy work, then you've contributed enough that you deserve to just slack off and be left in peace for the rest of your life.
The most valuable debugging skill I learned in 15 years: asking "dumb" questions out loud. Last month I spent 3 hours chasing a race condition that disappeared the moment I explained the code to a junior dev who asked "why are we using a global here?" The willingness to look stupid just saved us from shipping a critical bug.
While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I also wonder how much his 'data' about Nobel Prize winners and Institute of Princeton grads actually holds up vs how much of it is just very expected regression to the mean. He talks about Shannon; at some point Shannon was always going to have his last great idea. Given that the idea that made him famous was his greatest, you wouldn't expect many other ideas like that just from normal variation.
Essentially, if you take scientific ideas, including Nobel Prize ideas, and put them all on a bell curve of how difficult it is to find them, you wouldn't expect the same person to have multiple ideas all the way on the right, even if they are very above average.
Whey you are young and inexperienced, you don't know enough to know somethig is a "bad" idea.
When you are older and experienced, you've seen a lot of bad ideas and you worry about it because you don't want to look bad among your peers.
When you are much older, you don't give a shit. You know that none of it really matters and when you are dead nobody is going to be talking about all the bad ideas you had.
People in their 20s care way too much about reputation and ego - as did I when I was in my 20s. So much that it's paralyzing. It will prevent them from saying or doing the things they really need to say and do.
On top of fear of looking stupid, my bigger concern is lack of novelty in my work. Seems like any idea I have for a blog post or book, or any photo I'm planning has already been explored in depths by someone else. I know the joy is in the process mostly, not the result. But doing something while knowing it is certainly not original make it really hard.
It probably has. It's super difficult to be truly unique in a world where billions have learned to read and write. It doesn't matter however. The people who see your work haven't seen/read everything out there. You can be unique for them.
You shouldn't disregard that even when you have the same intent as someone else, you work your way to get there, and that's usually more than enough to build a distinction.
I have a principle similar to this. The First Idiot Principle: never be afraid to be the first idiot in the room. Usually others have the same reservations you do about sharing.
I have no problem being the first, it's that I'm also the ~3rd, ~9th, ~24th and then they realize, wait, he's not a creative genius at all, we hired a total fucking retard!
Just when they give up on you hit em with a masterpiece.
Gonna be a bit controversial here, and say that sometimes the opposite can happen. That someone becoming successful can give them the confidence to share ideas they wouldn't have shared otherwise, and give ideas that people would have otherwise written off as 'ridiculous' a level of extra credibility in the process.
And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ideas put forward by successful companies and business people (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else) would never get off the ground if put forward by a random individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that make the world better off.
At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything, popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.
So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it can equally make you more likely to try them since your status gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to tell you no.
A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever on the cake but couldn’t really think of anything. We stood around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones." And it worked!
It's a well known creative / brainstorming trick that the best way to have a lot of good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.
Focus on genesis decoupled from critique, then critique later.
I've never been afraid to share bad ideas because the best way to get to a good one is to go through the bad ones. Sometimes my bad ideas will spark a good idea from somebody else or sometimes it even turns out that my bad idea isn't bad at all and people like it and we end up adopting it.
Either way, not being afraid to look dumb keeps the juices flowing. And keeps the conversation going. Or sometimes it starts the conversation that nobody else is willing to start.
> Just this: are you willing to look stupid today? That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
That’s always been one of my strengths. I used to ask questions in classes, that would have the teacher look at me, like I was a dunce, and the rest of the students in stitches. It has always been important for me to completely understand whatever I’m learning. I can’t deal with “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” I have to really know why; not just what.
By the end of the class, the other students would be asking me for help, and no one was laughing at me. I tended to get good grades.
The worst teacher that I ever had, was a genius mathematician, who shut me down, when I did that. It was the only incomplete that I ever had. The best teachers would wince, but treat the question as a serious one.
One of the really nice things about using an LLM, is not having to deal with sneering.
> The writing isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely not good enough to publish.
Ira Glass has a nice quote which is worth printing out and hanging on your wall
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Or if you're into design thinking, the Cult-of-Done[1] was a decade ago.
That's the exact opposite of OP's issue, right? He was producing, and it was good, but somewhere along the way he developed good taste (or some facsimile). Ira is claiming that people who are creative beginners start with good taste, which doesn't seem to be the case for a lot of us.
> The overwhelming majority of mutations end up being harmful or neutral. An exceedingly small fraction are beneficial.
Neutral drift is perhaps the most important part of evolution. It's how you preserve diversity over time and avoid getting stuck in holes in the fitness landscape.
If we only ever made steps that improved performance we'd inevitably see premature convergence. The neutral drift can overpower progress toward a global minimum, but it's a lot better to be going in circles than to not be moving at all. Diversity collapse is the worst thing that can happen to an evolutionary algorithm. You must reject superior solutions with some probability in order to make it to the next step. You can always change your selection pressure. You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.
> “You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.”
Assuming there’s no Deity or similar outside power seeding the initial system with information that can only be lost and never gained, then any information in the evolutionary system got there by some process that happened once, and presumably can happen again and fix (rediscover) the lost information?
Good advice to the younger folks. You can afford to look stupid. So go ahead and do that thing you wanted to try. There's more acceptance because of your age. You're expected to fail in some ways.
Once you have a mortgage, a reputation to maintain, an image of competence to uphold at work, you pretty much can't afford to look stupid in my opinion.
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist and MIT professor, is known for his "provocative ideas" and has a self-imposed rule regarding his work: "Every time I've written ten mainstream papers, I allow myself to indulge in writing one wacky one". This approach allows him to pursue unconventional, "crazy" theories without jeopardizing his reputation as a serious scientist.
Intelligence and ignorance are two different things. It is a sign of intelligence to be able to acknowledge your ignorance when it exists. Then you use your intelligence to correct that. Even with a mortgage this has never failed me. 20 years, 2 employers due to an ownership change, and several RIFs survived.
The power of saying, "I don't know, but I will find out" is underestimated.
There’s different levels to stupidity as well, coming up with a “bad” idea, writing a very brief prototype of it, and presenting it to a senior for feedback is one level that is typically harmless. Coming up with a “bad” idea, going skunkworks on it and when you think you have something demoing it to many seniors and managers and showing them you’ve been working out of scope for a month on a bad side project that doesn’t work while the rest of the team is burdened in tasks is another much higher level
I don’t mind looking stupid. It’s actually an important part of my identity - I lay my humanity bare. I am of flesh after all.
I’m starting to suspect that it’s making it more difficult for me to land a job though. I don’t know. There’s something about it. It’s almost as if businesses aren’t hiring human beings, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
It's a numbers game in the end. Law of large numbers at play again. The noise drops with more tries.
I suppose the corporate culture thinking is exactly opposite to this with metrics like efficiency, productivity etc. You cannot afford to try a lot and look stupider.
Efficiency, metrics, and willingness to look stupid works when nobody has much future power over you. If you can just refresh to a new pool, that is fine but if it is the same pool, it has consequences.
I was on an interview panel for a role and a guy lost out on the role because about 18 months prior, he had asked too many questions one time and because of that the PM thought he struggled to grasp concepts.
Although true, I feel it's worth adding here that the problem is that PM. While looking stupid by asking questions can "do you in" when working with incompetent managers like that, I'd argue that most managers will look at results -- and asking dumb questions can lead to much better results compared to just staying quiet and hoping for the best.
"The biggest things in life have been achieved by people who, at the start, we would have judged crazy. And yet if they had not had these crazy ideas the world would have been more stupid." - Arsène Wenger
I find it incredibly easy on people and processes my life does not depend on being the way it is. I find it incredibly annoying and unconfortable when around people and processes my life depends on.
I actually don't like this statement. I'd rephrase it because trying to speak in a language doesn't make you look stupid, or at least it shouldn't. Saying "I look stupid everyday" just reinforces that there is something inherently stupid about not knowing a language and trying to learn it. If anything trying to learn a language when it's not a requirement for something, is really anything but stupid.
Idk if that's universal, when I run into people who struggle with English or just don't know it my first thought has never been this is a stupid person.
No, it does. Even if the audience knows that your English or other languages is perfectly professional, speaking Chinese at a lower level does leave a certain negative impression.
I think the phrasing is fine. It's self-aware. It acknowledges that stupidity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
"Looking stupid" is not the same as "being stupid." It could be very smart indeed, depending on your circumstances, to learn an additional language, and the point being made is that when going out in public and speaking it in front of native speakers, ridicule is not unexpected, and should be embraced.
True. When we were in Italy, my wife couldn't say a single phrase in Italian because she was afraid she might make a mistake. I knew not making one would be impossible, so I just geared down to "barbarian" to get my point across.
"Good morning. Tickets destination Grossetto, please. Two adults, one child. Six years. Yes, return. Card acceptable? Thank you."
YES!
happens to me all the time in things big and small. At work, at home, with the kids, my wife, and their birthday presents.
I once talked to a somewhat famous writer who told me this very thing.
He said his worst critic was his inner demon biting him at every thought, every phrase, questioning his wording, waiting for the greatest possible idea, discarding all that was not breathtaking enough.
Why do we have to be great all the time? Who is telling us to be best?
And i know that in writing this i am pruning myself again trying to find the best words here.
Imagine that: i want enough points for karma to be able to post here my greatest idea. Which ironically enough, is the best greatest idea i had in a loooong time, and the moment i want to share it i must wait to be found good enough and worth to be heard.
I guess the only thing we can do is to disconnect our feeling of self worth from outside signals and be happy with the little things that made us smile when we did not know nor care about other peoples opinions.
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid. I’ve spent a long time thinking about what this reason could be. The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile, and by not sharing any work at all, we never have to risk our egos being damaged. If we never share anything, then nothing bad can ever happen to us. But the flip side to protecting our egos is that we never end up making anything worthwhile.
This seems oversimplified, since there's a second, unmentioned possibility that somebody doesn't share an idea:
In a capitalist society, people sense there could be monetary potential with their idea, so they sit on it quietly (often never getting around to developing it, etc).
This fear has been amplified in recent years with AI vacuuming up everybody's intellectual property with zero reward. Can't really blame people for doing nothing in such conditions.
And for the commenters complaining about "low/high trust societies," they ought to consider factoring the above into their definition.
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's the prevalence of AI-generated text on the Internet now, but I feel more motivated to just... type stuff out and post it now without giving it too much thought (where previously I would overthink things.) Could be all the Claude Code prompting I've been doing too? Not sure.
I feel more motivated to write now because a "badly" written text made by a human to me is always better than a "perfect" text completely made by AI. Everyone has their own way of writing. Embracing that in these times is something to find motivation in.
- Could be a much higher prevalence of badly written AI-generated articles, awful AI slop code etc - you know you can do better
- Could be the opposite, the fact that a lot of what is AI-generated is well polished, at least on a surface - your raw input is distinguishable as a human and rated higher by yourself or others
- Could be the motivation to try to keep internet human-made even if it seems like a lost fight
- Could be the fact that people overall take less effort to write things as you can always polish it up with AI - some decide not to do that and still post it - you feel safer doing the same
I would have loved for the author to cover the 3rd category - people whose ego doesn't let them post anything even before they're known. Everyone in small towns and cities already feels "known" and exposed vs living in big cities like NYC.
I like this post, and reality is of course more nuanced. You can read it between the lines of this article as well: by taking smaller more frquent steps (posting more regularly in context of the article) you can recover faster and and try more ideas in a short amount of time. I guess this is also what a lot of modern development methodologies and start-up mentality rely on too, so I hardly think I'm sharing something new. Still, if you have the option to make your attempt smaller it's generally worth it.
Of course you still have to take the plunge no matter how small.
> I keep thinking about the version of me from a few years ago. He was worse at almost everything. Worse writer, worse thinker, worse at making things. Nobody really knew him and nobody really cared what he had to say. And yet he had so much more courage.
I would not agree that that earlier version had necessarily more courage. If no one cared than the associated risk is also lower, and thus less courage needed.
I overall agree with how important the courage to do stuff that might make you look stupid is, though.
I don't think we ever escape the desire to avoid looking bad - we just recontextualize it. For instance the article is basically making a short vs long term argument - in the short term you might look foolish, but as a result you might produce something of value (which in the long term will make you look fantastic).
So personally I prefer to frame these things that way - it's not that we should want to look foolish for its own sake (obviously), it's that part of getting anywhere in life is taking some risks and developing your threshold for doing so.
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid ... The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile
I disagree with this, at least in how it regards ego as pointless.
Humans are tuned to win a delicate social competition by becoming popular and therefore having a bunch of kids with other popular (and therefore reproductively successful) people. The most plausible explanation is that our ancestors have been through millions of years of evolutionary selection to try to become the most popular in a social group by taking risks, but then cease all risk-taking and guard their position after they get there.
Ego is the mechanism by which this happens, but it's there for a reason. Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human connection. We haven't always lived in societies which are so open to failure, experimentation, or looking stupid.
Somehow, it always triggers my skepticism when supposedly sociobiological or evolutionary anthropological or evolutionary psychological arguments are brought up. My suspicion is that it is far too easy to simply pack in the story you want to have in there. I can think of dozens of objections to your description. For example, in small groups, the social game in terms of status may not be that complex, and the choice for pairings may be very limited.
I'll leave it at that because I don't want to write a novel. But when I look at your description, I don't see any plausibility at all. I only see projections. Like in The Flintstones or in old movies about Stone Age people, who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today. What I mean is: the social dynamics you're assuming here may be primarily shaped by your experiences in the present and are far from as universal as you believe.
Fair enough, but if you remove the evo psych explanation you're still left with "people don't want to look stupid in front of their peers because it might have consequences". This seems plausible to me regardless.
I've never encountered a person who was attracted to a stupid person.
BTW, the Flintstones is just The Honeymooners without Jackie Gleason. One could also argue that Family Guy and The Simpsons are also reboots of The Honeymooners.
> who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today
"They're the modern stone age family" are the words in the Flintstones' theme song.
Even in small groups, being respected and considered valuable is important? I'm not sure what you mean here.
I take your point, and I too get triggered when people invoke mate selection and dopamine. I could be with you in being skeptical about that specific angle... but absolutely if you look at lawless or less institutionalized cultures, there is a trend towards appearing strong/tough and hiding any weaknesses
Can we ascribe it all to ego, I wonder, or is it just one of several mechanics at play, albeit an important one. A Dutch saying is that there's a lid for every pot ("op elk potje past een dekseltje") i.e. that the most unlikely people still manage to find a partner and form a family. That very clumsy person who stutters, and is perceived by an ego-driven person as "a loser" still finds someone who thinks they are adorable and attractive.
At work I dare to look stupid and in my friend group too. It hasn’t always led to a good outcome since people simply believe you’re actually stupid and the problem with that is that they don’t take you seriously enough. Now, you can say: their loss. But man, I need to eat. With friends, sure. At work? After years of looking stupid, I had enough of it.
Also finding a partner is mostly about being silly with each other. So looking a bit stupid is a plus there and had no issues about it on that front
Not sure if this is the right place to respond, but I’ve only seen this play in situations where people visibly want to look better than others, because they feel insecure about their status.
Frankly, I have no idea how to explain it in words, but when you’re in a setting where everyone knows they’re good at their own thing, but also know the others are also exceptional at their thing, this game goes away. Like it actually becomes the opposite. Everyone calls themselves stupid, become more cordial, and things get fun. Trying to not to look stupid signals negative status, or whatever you call it.
It’s very funny to write this out, because I’ve never thought about it on purpose. Everything has just felt natural at the time of the event.
>> Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human connection.
You dont want to do dumb things that might get you in jail and have rveryone shun you.
But should u be so afraid of brusing your ego that you shy away from: starting a business (if u have the financial means), asking someone out, publishing something in public, etc
Sometimes evolution overshoots, esp when our environment changes
The actual most plausible explanation becomes clear when you rearrange the words into the right order: "There might be a good reason why people who want to avoid looking stupid are smart ..." Forcing oneself to become smart is the only escape from looking stupid.
"The people I think are smart are those that try to look smart", that is the most plausible. There are probably many smart people who aren't afraid of looking stupid that you think are stupid for that reason.
Personally I dislike people who never say stupid things, because they are focusing too much on appearances and too little on trying to figure things out.
> "The people I think are smart are those that try to look smart", that is the most plausible.
The story does not appear to define smart as "not looking stupid", rather something more towards "mastered the creative process".
There is only so much time in the day. An hour spent in interaction where you might look stupid is an hour not spent directly working on your craft. The most plausible explanation is that those who don't want to look stupid turn towards becoming smart as the escape. As in, a tendency to use time spent alone locked up in a room learning how to use a new tool instead of galavanting at an art show is what makes them become smart.
I agree with the popular thing, but only up to a point, for a certain type of people, or from a certain age on (for me this latter case holds true), competing against other people just isn't a valid concern anymore, the societal "recognition" stops being a thing.
In my case, and I suppose this holds true for others, too, the "fiercest" competition is with one's inner-self or, at the very most, with past/dead/way-out-of-line-of-sight "competitors" that have nothing to do with current society and its recognition. I know that this "competing against one-self" sounds trite, but, again, this is how things are for some of us.
This is also what's called the beginner's mind, Shoshin. [0] One of the core concepts of Zen Buddhism. Tangentially related would be the concept of no-mind, Mushin. [1]
Ward said it succinctly, as was his wont: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
The fear of looking stupid is basically a false positive machine. It optimizes so hard for not being wrong (type I error?) that it rejects way more ideas than it should. And most of the time the "that I'll look dumb" signal is just noise - nobody actually cares or even notices. You're always standing on the safe side of a threshold that's set way too conservatively.
Reading this makes me think of the effect of doing something you do all the time, and are pretty great at, but when someone is watching you, you inevitably make a stupid mistake.
It also makes me think of certain people that attain the level of fame where everything they do is praised, whether it is objectively good or not.
The hardest version of this in engineering is asking "why does this work?" after something is already running. Everyone assumes someone else understood it when they built it. Often nobody did.
What has potential AGI teached me is that no matter what I write, as long as I do it manually, it has value. Not because it is good but because it is genuine.
Before LLMs I would never think that what I have to say is valuable in any way. Now I realize my every comment, my every human input to the global internet and society is infinitely more valuable than ai slop.
This has really given me a jolt I needed and confidence to freely voice anything anywhere knowing that I make a difference against the flood of auto generated soulless garbage.
Flaws in human writing aren’t an issue, they are the very feature I look for. These exaggerations, hyperboles, emotions. It’s all unmistakably human.
Even 4chan is an oasis of humanity in that way. Indeed it is bristling with genuine creativity despite its sole ingredient is 100% human flaws. No preservatives, no artificial sweeteners.
Holy shit I really wrote it quite fun, I encourage everyone to do the same have some fun writing because each one of us is now highly valued artist in a flood of ai slop literally no matter what you type I want to read your flawed shit.
It’s actually a blessing when people don’t have huge expectations of you. The higher their expectations get, the more your stress increases and your productivity drops. Forever the underdog :)
It's true that a Nobel prize can blunt a scientist's productivity, but for balance, the kind of extraordinary result that merits a Nobel might also not be replicable in one scientist's career, regardless of how the world reacts to it.
We would need to compare career trajectories of productive scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's ability to function.
But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider António Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949 Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy, eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they lived through the procedure.
Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so profusely for his breakthrough procedure?
I'm human so I'm certainly not immune to social anxiety or embarrassment from looking stupid, but I have been trying to do a manual override that for the last year.
Something it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize is that the first draft of nearly everything I do is bad. The first draft of my code is usually bad, the first draft of an essay I write is usually bad, the first version of something I draw is usually bad. If I don't allow myself to look stupid, even if only for the first draft of something, then I'll never accomplish anything. Doing something crappy is a means to doing something not-crappy.
I don't think I'm alone with this. There appears to be some ambiguity on who actually first said this, but there's an adage of "There's no great writing, only good rewriting".
What a genuine read. And it is kinda the whole reason why i started blogging (shameless plug: stupid-ideas.com). You never git gud if you never start. And you innevitably look stupid to some people when starting.
I think I was 35 when I first said to myself: "When you don't understand something, it's either because it's difficult, or because you don't have all information you need yet."
Being able to think this (and really feel it) was a big step for me. I think objectively I was always quite smart and also highly educated but I still felt like an imposter. It's nice when you finally feel that trust in yourself. And indeed I probably sometimes look stupid, but I think I often come back quickly in smart ways afterwards anyway, so I don't care so much about it.
There is sibling concept of the Nobel prize winner ending up doing less meaningful work after they received their price. In history there are countless examples of the underdog emerging from the shadows and the dominant empire collapsing under its own weight; a natural rotation of roles. It is explained in detail here: https://youtu.be/ybufqRY77PQ
I've observed this behavior at work. It doesn't present itself only as not sharing. People with recognition and political leverage can share wrong ideas confidently, and others will naturally follow them. If they're challenged on that idea, and even presented evidence that it's wrong, they often push back and double down on it, or don't acknowledge the correction at all.
I think this is more detrimental to the team and organization than the fear of sharing the wrong idea. For some reason, some senior people will do anything to avoid losing face in public, yet they still seek recognition for their work.
On the other hand, it is a real pleasure to work with senior people who can acknowledge their mistakes, are willing to learn from them, and course correct if needed. It shows maturity and humility, and sets a good example for others, which is exactly what good leaders should do.
> So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just... stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than producing nothing at all.
"Loosening up" is a way to describe this skill.
It reminds me of a story from Richard Feynman. In his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he recalls an art class when he was instructed to draw without looking at the paper. The first time he did it, his pencil broke at the very beginning and he had nothing but impressions in his paper.
The second time he did it, he was impressed with the results, noticing a “funny, semi-Picasso like strength” in his work.
He knew that it would be impossible to draw well without looking at the paper, so he didn’t consciously try. He writes, “I had thought that ‘loosen up’ meant ‘make sloppy drawings,’ but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.”
There is a lot I like about this post, including the author's intuition to invoke the jellyfish.
A lion’s mane jellyfish can release up to 45,000 eggs per day. The jellyfish’s strategy is to lay as many eggs as possible and leave them to fend for themselves. Most of these eggs don’t survive, probably fewer than 0.1%.
Compare this with an elephant, which can only give birth to one calf at a time. The elephant’s strategy is to dedicate its effort into raising a relatively small number of calves. Many of these calves survive to see adulthood. This approach might sound familiar because it’s how we raise our kids as well.
The advantage to writing a blog, nowadays, is because your writing will be so difficult hard to discover, you can put all your ideas out there—good and bad—and only become known for the good ones. (That's what I'm hoping to do!)
I'm a nearly 40 year old man and I skip through the halls at work most days. It's something I've been doing for a long time because it's fun, it's faster than walking, and it looks silly. It seems to help some people loosen up when they see their colleague skipping down the hall and I think that helps team morale.
Measured. If what you are saying is being downvoted this group might not be ready for it.
Saying something like Claude is over rated as a general llm because of loftly guardrails will get downvotes today but seen as insightful down the road. You can be too early or late.
Take Tailwinds. Is it loved or hated now? We went through different phases.
I don’t even consider assigning a numerical score to a post meaningful. Downvoting is for trash posts that we all agree are trash, like the weirdos who write angry insults or the AI spam, not a quantitative metric. When applied to honest commentary it feels like twelve year olds yelling shut up at you.
It's been very interesting to see what does and doesn't get downvoted. A couple of people didn't like me pointing out the reality of STIs for example although no one really wants to get one.
I am definitely positioning myself in this category, even here in HN discussions, I prefer to do so rather than overthinking and undersharing. The reason was because few years ago I had an interview, and the company saw my portfolio and the work I did and they were overhyped about having me, they gave me 5 stars service to get me to the company HQ for the interview, but in real life I am too humble and not much of an over seller of myself, so the bar they had about me was waaay higher than how I was IRL, and got rejected haha, it was brutal rejection because I really wanted to work there and they evaluated me based on the few hours interaction rather than what I am able to do. Since then I try to keep the bar low early on and take it from there.
“Fragile ego” is such a tired trope. It is certainly a factor, but its effects are way overestimated. Something about “fragile ego” seems to stop people from thinking any further.
“Looking stupid” has an obvious downside. Just restate it as “proven incompetent.” If you are proven incompetent within your social group, you lose your power. Loss of power has terrible consequences! Duh!
When someone blames fragile ego, which is equivalent to saying “fear of losing self-respect” but ignores “being ostracized from access to resources and influence by people you depend upon and respect” I might conclude that I should ignore what that person thinks, because maybe they have a thinking impairment. (See how that works?)
Young people are not trying things because they are fearless, nor do they have bullet-proof egos, they are trying things because they really are stupid (in a gentle manner of speaking). They don’t know as much as they will know. Also, they know they have no social status and they must take risks to prove themselves.
Finally, they do it because they have nothing else to do and nothing else to protect.
Human society is too stifled by expectations of how every should behave, from the people who raise you and you grow up with and shows and movies, so much that we try to match that and be happy/sad/angry/prim/proper/etc. at times even when we don't really feel that way.
However had, at any level, people may look stupid for doing something that was not clever. I don't think even very smart people are 100% of the time very clever.
In this comment I'll use the words useless and "useless". The former's definition is the one we are most familiar with, while the latter, in quotation marks, is the literal definition if you break the word useless into its two components: use + less. So we have of no use whatsoever and of less use. Reminder: I am not using these words as insults, but rather neutrally. Also, I am using the general "you" here, similar to using "one", rather than referring to the reader or the author of the article in specific.
The problem with this article is that you're telling yourself you're not afraid of stupidity, which in this case is synonymous to incompetence or uselessness, yet your endgoal betrays otherwise. You're presenting a bunch of ideas that are 'useless' hoping amongst them is one of more use, hoping it all ties together and produces a wonderful result, as you get to yell "eureka". You do not want to accept uselessness, but to set your expectations of yourself, that either you or another person or persons have imposed, lower, back to where they once were. Or even lower. The reason your or another's expectations of you have risen after becoming older, as many comments have also wrote, is because your effort is being externally recognized by others, either by a Nobel price or a promotion. Regardless, your issue is self-esteem related. To combat lower(ing) self-esteem or insecurity, (and even accept uselessness!), you must love yourself.
Now a question: have you ever loved someone you didn't know at all? I don't mean in the physical sort of attraction, I mean someone that you knew nothing about whatsoever, not even how they look or act. It's impossible, isn't it? It is those we know the best that we feel love for, is it not? Now consider what the opposite of insecurity is. Security in one’s abilities and self, knowledge of one's limits as well as one's capabilities, and an acceptance of who one is. The more one grows, the more they change, so it is possible to know oneself and then not, as it is also possible the view others have make one to muddle their own perception. You won't find confident people who aren't aware of their own abilities or cannot accurately access what tools they have at their disposal. Confidence in abilities one doesn't have is not confidence, but overconfidence, and overconfidence is false confidence, which is as maladaptive as insecurity. I'll focus on those with low self esteem, because you fall into that category; these people are aware of their shortcomings or their potential shortcomings, their 'uselessness', because the higher you are the easier it is to fall, perhaps even inflate how many shortcomings they have. When you accept your "uselessness" you may produce some bad ideas, a few good ones, but in the end the fact that you're ok with it it makes you feel less distress about yourself, does it not?
Tie these together; you cannot love someone you do not know, and people who love themselves know their limits and what they can achieve, to be insecure is to misjudge your achievements, so because of this I assume, could be wrong, you do not love yourself enough. And watch, I said "enough", because knowing oneself completely is impossible. Similar to how reaching the truth is impossible, but becoming less wrong isn't.
Now uselessness. No one likes being bad at something; even babies are afraid of failure. I do not remember my time as a baby, but I remember being frustrated when I couldn't do certain things, like reaching a high place, as a toddler. Perhaps one of the reasons babies cry is because they cannot move their legs by their will. "Uselessness" can be overcome, but sometimes one may be actually useless and never learn how to walk. Does it sting, being called useless? I don't mean it as an insult here. I am using the literal definition of the word; complete inability to do something, rather than partial/subpar. It stings because it has been instilled on one that incompetence is negative, and thus something that should not be a part of you, a flaw needing purification. But if incompetence didn't exist, neither would competence, similarly to how life wouldn't be valuable without death or happiness without sadness.
However I like the gist and the thought behind this article.
Overall, I think acceptance that one might be unable to do certain things, can make one's life easier. The bad ideas you produce are as much of a part of you as your good ones. And accepting both is crucial.
...but is specifically reinforced into generating text that satisfies the humans training it, and therefore is innately predisposed towards approval-seeking generations.
This posts observation have interesting side-effects. Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work. And hierarchies and the fear of embarrassment do too. So, the more you try to force "excellence" into existence via external pressures and resource tracking, the more it disappears.
Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.
Or in a truly low-trust society, where you are part the kleptocrat chieftain system and you just use your take to do this kind of work. The classic MBA process will totally destroy any scientific or creative institution.
Graffiti on a bathroom stall is the purest form of art as it is not done for acclaim or monetary reward ... as the joke goes.
But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the understanding that they should not be prescriptive.
If it's not done for acclaim then why is it usually someone's handle?
In this context, bathroom stall graffiti would be lewd limericks and the like. Tagging is different. But also it's just a joke.
I think the joke claimed to make a real point, and it's totally fair to critize that point.
We're going to have to collect data on the ratio of bathroom graffiti between tags and limericks. Anecdotally, where I live a it's mostly silly goosery.
Just to be totally clear, here is an example. Please cover up my user name for an authentic experience.
A dozen, a gross, and a score, Plus three times the square root of four, Divided by seven, Plus five times eleven, Is nine squared, and not a bit more.
it's like bragging you're Spartacus
Interesting—this feels like a very “engineering manager” sort of observation that isn’t actually all that generalizable.
My observation is that people share incredibly creative work all the time in all different sorts of societies. Humans are inherently creative beings, and we almost always find a way. Certainly a person needs _some_ resources (time, most importantly) in order to work creatively, but confidence in one’s abilities can and does regularly get the better of fear (e.g. that which can emerge from observation, measurement, hierarchies, etc.).
I can think of countless artists—writers, musicians, visual artists—who have succeeded in both doing & sharing “truly creative work” (however that’s defined) in the face of “success” & all of its concomitant challenges.
> Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work
No, not really. Broadly, it's not "measurements, metrics and surveillance" that kill creativity, it's the inability to make reasonable thresholds for failure. If the threshold is too low, one might never be able to get the critical mass of resources they need to achieve their task. If it's set too high, people will milk resources even when they have no creativity left to give to an unsolved problem.
I agree with your main points, but as I have both a BFA and an MBA I want to point out that the MBA focused very much on creating high-trust work environnments.
I think there must be a better label for the process that is destroying scientific and creative institutions.
Just an observation from a non-MBA. I feel that the MBA management class likes to create two class society where there is management class and a worker class. The management class has high trust amongst each other but no trust for the workers. The workers need to be controlled tightly and can’t be trusted. They are extremely reluctant to take feedback from the people who do the work. Better to pay consultants a lot of money. I have seen that in almost every larger company where I was employee or contractor.
Fear of failure is a stumbling block for science.
That's why many universities declare in their charter that research doesn't have to be practical. The practicality of RSA asymmetric encryption only became practical with the advent of the internet ;)
> Fear of failure is a stumbling block for science. That's why many universities declare in their charter that research doesn't have to be practical.
No, universities do that because it's limiting to only focus on practical science, not because scientists are afraid to fail. Theoretical breakthroughs often find their use in practice with time.
Fear of failure is because we only put money on success, so researchers' livelihood, dignity and prestige depend on their research bearing fruit.
I see this post as something motivational around public writing or public speaking.
It's true that the more you are afraid of expressing yourself, the worse your "performance" is going to be.
On general work level it's different.
There the trust needs to be balanced.
People should feel free to express themselves, but also that they need to meet some certain standards of quality at work.
Otherwise we may tend to relax too much and become sloppy in certain areas.
Nicely put. That's why most of the innovation over the centuries came from the high trust style societies.
With the decline of trust, I fear we as a civilization are going into a long period of stagnation or even regression. Unfortunately, at this point there's no socially acceptable way to reverse the trend of trust destruction.
Reputation. Its a good concept. We might need to bring it back and not externalise it to linked-in blindly. Honour is also nice to have.
I have often thought that there should be a public ledger of some sort for people (powered by vouching), and then immediately forseen the negative externalities and abandoned that idea.
Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain how.
No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it is to judge people by their popularity. Though it is far more expensive.
Popularity and reputation are not the exact same thing. Reputation is about trust and predictability, while popularity is about awareness of the person and/or their reputation.
But your points largely stands. However, reputation is one of many tools that can be used to assess the worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be given a relatively low weight compared to other tools. Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their reputation with effort.
When I first considered this in the late 90's I was inspired by Google's Page Rank algorithm, and wanted something akin to that for humans in a social network.
My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.
It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.
A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.
To bring the honor system back, we need to value honor again as a society. Doing honorable things should be compensated in some tangible way, as well as doing dishonorable things should be punished by society.
PS: I'm not talking about fake "honor" based power systems.
I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.
The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but cannot be wished away.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they have done more drone development in four years than the entire world together in forty.
> I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.
The class that brought most of the innovations, citizens of Rome or Athens, a privileged ruling class, had a strong in-group honor system. The rest of the society was not so, but they were so divided that those other parts didn't even count.
Leadership requires hourly updates all the way down to me so I barely get anything done
I always wonder how they justify stuff like that. What's the cost of producing those updates (including the opportunity cost of not doing something else) vs the value of the report?
> Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.
I don’t know about “high trust”, but I can say with confidence that the “make more mistakes” thesis misses a critical point: evolutionary winnowing isn’t so great if you’re one of the thousands of “adjacent” organisms that didn’t survive. Which, statistically, you will be. And the people who are trusted with resources and squander them without results will be less trusted in the future [1].
Point being, mistakes always have a cost, and while it can be smart to try to minimize that cost in certain scenarios (amateur painting), it can be a terrible idea in other contexts (open-heart surgery). Pick your optimization algorithm wisely.
What you’re characterizing as “low trust” is, in most cases, a system that isn’t trying to optimize for creativity, and that’s fine. You don’t want your bank to be “creative” with accounting, for example.
[1] Sort of. Unfortunately, humans gonna monkey, and the high-status monkeys get a lot of unfair credit for past successes, to the point of completely disregarding the true quality of their current work. So you see people who have lost literally billions of dollars in comically incompetent entrepreneurial disasters, only to be able to run out a year later and raise hundreds of millions more for a random idea.
I've never understood the "high-strust/low-trust" social dichotomy. I've never processed "society" as a single entity, but a large system with many independent aspects, and my levels of trust vary wildly across them and over time.
I'd also offer that there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work" but we often see the two as separate because we only have convenient access to one or the other.
It's not that complicated: statistics matter.
5% of people create 90% of the crime. Double 5% to 10% and you double the crime. Make it 50% and and you 10x the crime.
You still have 50% of non-criminals but society with 50% criminals has way more crime than society with 5% criminals.
You might say high-crime society is much worse than low-crime society even though they both have individuals that are criminals and non-criminals.
Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society. They both have individuals with various levels of trust, but emergent behavior driven by statistics creates a very different society.
> there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work"
To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
Also I don't see you're bringing the "true scottsman" judgement here. What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work. Who gets to decide what is "truly creative" vs. merely "creative".
> Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society.
We already have "high-crime society" and "low-crime society." What this has to do with overall levels of trust in different parts of the system, say, education, is not immediately clear to me. Do all high crime societies have untrustworthy education systems as well?
> To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
To make my intention clear, the other difference is "popularity," which exemplifies the precise confusion I was reacting to.
> What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work.
I didn't invoke it. The GP did. I'm willing to admit to whatever their subjective judgement is. I wonder if their connection between trust and "true creativity" is valid regardless of any possible definition. My gambit above was to openly suppose a good faith reason for the difference in my point of view.
The point was that both crime and trust are aggregate statistics.
I think you gotta define where you're drawing the box. Depending on the context, "society" might be your nation, your office, or just a 1:1 relationship with your coworker.
That indicates that you live in a relatively high-trust society. Obviously there is a spectrum and aspects, but they tend to correlate.
I don't know of any real-world society that would be very high-trust in one regard (say, keeping their doors unlocked), but very low-trust in another (say, routinely poisoning their spices with lead to make them look more appealing - yes, this happens [0]).
[0] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/how-to-stop-tur...
Have you not been to any so called low trust country? The difference is quite apparent in how people regard each other. With your alias, parts of Italy would qualify.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-mos...
trust is very VERY expensive commodity
> after a initial proof of ability.
This has just as much chilling effect. At the very least it's gatekeeping.
This comment is spot on
recently execs in companies think software dev isnt creative work because llm can churn out equivalents. So they are openly tracking all sorts of metrics on devs now.
If those metrics are good they will be able to use them to find out that the metrics themselves dont work.
I find that restrictions not only don't kill creative work, they enable it. Measuring anything makes you consider constraints, which helps foster better creativity - at least for me, and I see the same in others as well.
Restrictions have dimensions. I have enjoyed working in highly cooperative situations where we had restrictions of resources and rules but no restrictions in terms of allowing us to find solutions. Infact those solutions were celebrated by my manager who had to work within the confines of rules and resources defined for him. It was great fun.
That isn’t really correct.
Fear of observation is highly correlated with neuroticism. Creativity, on the other hand, is a component of openness which is highly correlated with intelligence. The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism, which simultaneously are the people least concerned by impacts of increased observation.
Furthermore, high trust social environments only contribute to the degree of disclosure, not creativity. In low trust social environments creative people remain equally creative but either do not openly expose their creative output or do so secretly for subversive purposes.
This feels like it's conflating a couple of different things.
Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors- Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes, since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most creative people" though.
Secondly, I'd push back that people low in neuroticism would be "least concerned by" surveillance. While strictly technically true, that's not a helpful framing, as it seemingly implies surveillance would have a negligible negative impact for people low in neuroticism. If that's what you're implying, I'd like to see references.
I'm not able to comment at all on the conclusing about "degree of disclosure" being moderated by trust level in social environment, especially how "creative people remain equally creative but do not openly expose their creative output". If true, this implies that trust in society doesn't impact primary (unshared) creative output at all- that's a very strong claim in my opinion. I'd very much like references on this.
> Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness.
I never claimed this and I have no idea why you would think I did.
What I do know is that nearly 1 in 3 JavaScript developers, based upon large anonymous polls, self identify as autistic. If that is representative of software employment as a whole then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people at levels far exceeding the outside population. Everybody wants to think they are more awesome, creative, and highly intelligent compared to everybody else, but that is numerically irrational.
Low neurotic people are generally less scared of just about everything including third party observation. Less fear and less anxiety is the very definition of low neuroticism.
> The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism
You did claim this.
> self identify as autistic. (...) then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people
This is hateful and wrong. Autistic people aren't necessarily self indulgent, and not self evidently neurotic, though it happens to be the case that autistic people have a higher incidence of neuroticism, which is partially due to people describing them, for example, as "self indulgent".
You've shifted your claims, you're not supporting your claims by either argument or reference, and you've added hateful rhetoric. This is very regrettable.
You need to get over yourself. Autism is a medical diagnosis. If things like medicine and psychology and not reading people's comments correctly makes you sad then it does not matter what the comments actually say.
And yes, many autistic people, though not all, are exceptionally self-indulgent, which just literally means self-preference. Its a problem of less developed introspection which parallels a less developed interpretation of social intelligence.
I have not shifted my claims. I originally said people with fear of observation, a trait of high neuroticism, is a major constraint of many things including creativity. I also said creativity is an aspect of high openness, which is closely correlated to high intelligence. I never said neuroticism is in any correlated, either positively or negatively, to either openness or intelligence. I think you have trouble with bias, as in you want statements to imply something not stated.
I teach at an art university for 8 years now. I would highly doubt that: The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism.
In my experience that isn't the complete picture. I have met highly creative people who are extremely (unhealthy so) concerned with what others think, yet go their own path anyways. It is true that creative people often tend to do things in a way that appears as if it is outside of the frame of normal parameters. But this isn't so simple either, because maybe it is context dependent. A punk musician may live in disregard of the aesthetical conventions of society, but they also may have a traded canon of styles and works their own subculture. So maybe that punk doesn't care what society thinks about them, but they may care about what other punks think.
My experience with hundreds of art students is that there is no correlation between how independent someone works and how creative their output is. There are many ways of producing interesting ideas and the lone (usually: male) genius being the only true way is by this point a well-refuted idea.
I think the idea that one must be naturally impervious to shame to be "the right sort" of creative is attractive, but it's used to disregard the courage necessary to show oneself and open up in the way that builds the creator.
Lots of amazing artists, creators and researchers are obviously highly neurotic.
I did not base my comment on personal observations. It comes straight from psychology and the big 5.
I was also once an art student myself. Creativity extends far beyond individual contributions, which becomes evident in resource and personnel management. Creativity is highly correlated to openness, as is intelligence, and is least restricted by those who are most eager to exercise decisions and try new things without fear of consequence, whether real or perceived.
Openness is on the closed minded-openness axis. Neuroticism is on the neurotic-stable axis. These are independent things. You can be highly open-minded and highly neurotic. I’d seriously question your understanding of the Big 5.
> These are independent things.
I never claimed otherwise. You have invented your own strawman to attack.
Two folk who set the direction of the modern world - Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
https://historycollection.com/16-examples-of-the-madness-of-... https://www.science.org/content/article/origin-darwins-anxie...
Can't vouch for the accuracy of these descriptions but they don't suggest lack of neuroticism however brought on. Bodily dysfunction of whatever kind can be causative of course.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of Los Angeles public-access television’s Let’s Paint TV…
https://www.letspainttv.com/
Or, to save your eyes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Paint_TV
For more than 20 years, Mr. Let’s Paint TV (artist John Kilduff) has encouraged viewers to “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery. Just do the thing.
I couldn’t agree more with that impulse and TFA’s: the common trait that cuts across all the most impressive people I know—from artists to businesspeople to scientists to engineers to even leaders-of-organizations—is a cheerful unselfconsciousness, a humility, a willful simplicity—a willingness to put it out there while it’s raw and stupid and unformed, and hone it through practice with the people around them.
A taste:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PvbL_5rH1QQ
There is a book called Art & Fear which explores this in depth. A quick read and worth it for people that don’t consider themselves artists.
It has a great story (allegory) about a pottery class, which was shared here in the past. Six sentences. Worth a read:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097663
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass
> “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery
Instructions unclear. Have pushed secrets to github. When will slope to mastery commence?
Nobody said the valley was without fog
Once you realize your mistake, and only do it once or twice more times in your life, often when stressed or some other external stressor causes you to not follow your hunch.
See also:
Impostor Syndrome (noun), pathologic avoidance of identifying mediocrity in oneself, e.g. "I'm not mediocre, I just have impostor syndrome!"
Looks like he is still doing his thing here
https://www.instagram.com/letspainttv/
He should have co-hosted with Max Headroom.
goddam, that's beautiful. thanks for sharing!
Fantastic, thanks for sharing! I hadn't heard of this before. Very entertaining video!
That's super trippy but I like it.
Well, now I went down that rabbit hole. Thanks, I guess :-)
> Some of the best research ... has come from surprisingly young people. ... They're not afraid of looking stupid.
Young people aren't doing things without worrying about looking stupid, they just don't know that they look stupid. I say that as a former young person who was way more naive than I thought I was at the time. This is good and bad.
Also I think this point ignores that as people grow in their careers they often become more highly leveraged. I've moved from writing code to coaching others who write code. It is very normal for much of the "important" stuff to be done by relatively young people, but this understates the influence from more experienced people.
There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid. If you're the senior subject matter expert and get a question you can't answer, people still expect you to make an educated guess. The junior guy they expect to ask someone.
That does not match with my, very much anecdotal, experience.
Real subject matter experts are generally very clear about where their expertise ends. Less experienced people, not so much.
> There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid.
Also also they tend to be less financially "tethered" for want of a better word - mortgages, families, children, etc. - which makes it easier for them to be risky (consciously or not) about what/who/where they work on/with.
Probably not likely to be jumping from your stable 9/5 to a startup when you've got your semi-detached with 4 kids.
The sign of true subject matter expert is someone who has the confidence to say when they don’t know the answer.
Yes, but that better not be all the time, and around basic questions.
Sounds more like the sign of just a humble, honest person
This was on a poster in my 8th grade English teacher’s class:
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not know and does not ask remains a fool forever.”
Becoming proficient enough in my professional life such that I no longer felt anxiety about admitting what I did not know through asking questions was a massive achievement. Fortunately, I learned that lesson well and started applying it everywhere, not just in my work.
Successful professor with a very theoretical (as opposed to empirical) research trajectory here: this feels extremely accurate to me.
I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.
I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong, fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being wrong.
This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps not!
Willingness to look stupid and intellectual self-confidence are two sides of the same coin.
If you can find internal (rather than external) reasons to trust/believe in your own intelligence and capabilities, it makes it easier to be willing to look foolish. Also, a lack of knowledge/ability in a new area (or even a familiar area) is not a sign of a lack of capability. There's a difference between being a novice and being an idiot. So long as your source of intellectual self-confidence is strong enough (say, you have made great intellectual achievements in some other area of your life unrelated to the thing you're struggling with right now) its irrelevant if other people think you the fool: they're simply mistaken, and that's no skin off your back.
Someone (supposedly) published da Vinci's to do list a while back, and from the snippets I read he seemed to spend most of his time talking to experts about subjects he didn't know much about. Pretty telling if true.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187316
(posted many times, this has biggest comment section)
Plot twist: anything original will look stupid, until some cultural event makes the original thing the new "way," then all the small minds will act like that was the only way the thing should have been done all along.
"The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society and human nature than people realize.
What if the emperor had no clothes but he has a monster cock swanging left to right dickslapping the citizens as he walks by
They would be like Sir, Hey put that huge dick away you're scaring people
There would be a different lesson, is all I'm saying
I'm pretty sure this comment is going to get flagged, but I hope not because it's really funny.
> Plot twist: anything original will look stupid
Clearly not true, lots of original things that instead looks like "Ah yeah, obviously, duh!" once they're public, rather than looking stupid. Browsers/WWW, the iPhone and putting wheels on suitcases are things that come into mind that the amount of people thought "looked stupid" was very low, and they became very popular relatively quickly.
Those things are all incremental improvements based on existing patterns that people were familiar with. Also, Apple is the king of "no clothes". People shill Apple products even when they suck.
> Those things are all incremental improvements based on existing patterns that people were familiar with
So what in your mind has ever been "truly original" then that someone couldn't argue is just "incremental improvements" instead?
> People shill Apple products even when they suck.
I agree, but don't think I'm doing so myself here.
Look at Vincent Van Gogh's art. He didn't sell shit except to his own brother in life, people hated it. Fast forward to now and his art is among the most valuable in the world, and people consider him one of the greatest geniuses of all time.
How is one person's art not just incremental improvement on other's art? I expected some actually insightful answer, not just "Person Bs media creation was better than Person's A media", does that really count as "truly original" in your mind here? Yet browsers/WWW was just an incremental improvement? I'm sorry but I'm really confused now, sounds like we're really talking past each other here.
Browsers are just better gopher. If the WWW hadn't existed, we'd have xGopher 8.0 NG and our user experience would be mostly the same. Evolutionary pressures drive convergent evolution to stable solutions. We're on a technological gradient, and these things are incremental jumps driven by common human need (otherwise they wouldn't gain traction).
Creativity at the deepest level is seeing the cultural slope you're doing gradient descent on, and taking a hard left through the trees to a hidden slope that's way better rather than the one you were on.
I like Van Gogh as an example because of how hard he failed and the cultural U-turn, but hostility towards things that challenge the entrenched paradigm is a common response. Maybe Einstein and relativity is a more relevant example for you. People didn't read it at first and nod their heads, thinking to themselves "yes, of course!"
I think the best example for this are the Airpods
like, it was such a joke at first but then it just became the "new normal"
I got a pair of airpod clones on a whim (they were only $20 in the impulse buy section). Sure, they have less cable, but keeping them charged is very annoying, especially if wearing them for a long stretch of time. The charging contacts also tend to oxidize and not make good contact, but that's probably because they're a cheap clone. I find wired earphones are more convenient for long stretches because they draw power from my phone. I also know the wired earphones don't broadcast a tracking signal.
you can always buy a BT receiver and get the best audio quality/flexibility while mostly retaining the convenience
I remember thinking that wheeled suitcases were funny the first time I saw them. How silly I was...
It's easy to look stupid with no one around (editing your own writing), or with someone you trust deeply (choosing what to put on a cake with a friend), or if you're a jellyfish apparently. Those are spaces with people, or jellyfish, who you trust.
What's much, much harder is being willing to look stupid in front of people who have an interest in proving your competence (e.g. a manager or a customer) or who would be willing to hold it against you in the future (competitors, and jellyfish probably).
Being OK with taking a personal knock by asking a question that might set you back but that moves everyone else forward is a superpower. If you can build enough resilience to be the person in the room who asks the question everyone else is probably wondering about, even if it makes you look bad, eventually leads to becoming a useful person to have around. That should always be the goal.
Exactly, when your paycheck depends on you not being stupid, it takes some finesse, you can't just ask the silly questions and drop the mic.
So true! If you are in a relation focused environment/culture , looking stupid may harm your success. Context is really important as you explained.
It is sort of funny to think of Nobel prize level work in relation to blogposting. A couple of examples that don't conform: Marie Curie won another prize. Josephson in general (check him out). Feynman did greatly contribute to other fields after his prize. You can find as many counterexamples as examples if you dig a bit. I've witnessed a few times that looking like an idiot is the least of their concern.
I'm not sure this is the same thing but I waffle between wanting to not look stupid and also not wanting others to think I'm not trying hard enough.
Let's say there is something I need to do at work. I could read docs in the company internal site. I could read the code. Maybe the thing I need to do is figure out why a test is failing. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the code. It's possible it's failing because there is a bug in the test. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the CI/CQ. It's possible it's failing because some other dependency changed something.
The question is, when do I keep digging on my own vs ask for guidance and how much guidance? I never have a good feeling for that. I kind of wish the guidance was offered or encouraged as "I know you're not familiar with this stuff so let me walk you through this issue and then hopefully you can do it on your own the next time". But, I never know. I feel compelled to try to work it out on my own. Some of that is ego, like I can't do it on my own I must not be as good as others on my team. But I have no idea how much they asked vs figured out.
A few times when I do get guidance it's not enough. the person giving it isn't aware of all the hidden knowledge that's helping them figure out the issue and therefore doesn't pass it on.
As a mentor, I like to set explicit expectations for how much time someone should spend digging before asking for help, and I encourage others to do the same.
For an intern or new grad whose information gathering skills likely have gaps they don't even know about, I'll tell them to come check with me if they're completely blocked and haven't made progress for an hour, as it's frequently a small pointer or hint from me that can get them back on track. As they get more more knowledge about the systems and experience unblocking themselves, this grows to half a day, a day, and more from there.
The same applies even for experienced engineers who are new to the team, though the timeboxes grow much faster. There will always be little things to learn, and there's no point burning a day of chasing threads if it's some quirk in the system you just happen to not be aware of.
Let me add a nuance to this after seeing the replies. I've got 40years of experience. I'm not an intern. I still feel this. Just because I could write Linux, Photoshop, or Unreal Engine from scratch doesn't mean I know my particular company's massive infrastructure or their million file code base.
As an intern I feel the same everyday. It feels more natural to me to just keep digging into the codebase until I figure something out instead of asking for help.
Part of it is what you mentioned, as well as the fact that I sometimes feel bad for "wasting" a much more productive engineer's time.
It's also not clear from the other side. Do you give a lot of guidance, so the intern becomes reliant on always having someone telling them what to do exactly on the micro level? Or let them work it out slowly, and during that process get familiar with the systems more closely? I find that having a clear task to solve actually gets me more of an understanding of how everything works, than reading a top-down documentation where I don't have any context of "why".
Also interns can differ a lot. They can need different levels of guidance and can come with widely different levels of prior experience, even in unrelated debugging and troubleshooting like fixing network ports for LAN gaming or whatever kids these days might be doing. Setting up VPN to evade geoblocking or whatever. Others may have no idea what to even do. And those who can do it may take widely different time.
I think an internship is, in fact, a good place to learn these meta-lessons too. You ask for some guidance, then you see it was maybe too much. Another time you don't and spend a lot of time, and have your supervising engineer say "oh I could have told you XYZ very quickly", then you update and recalibrate. There is no single short message that can convey this. That's why experience is valuable.
> they just... stop trying
This foundational premise seems flawed. Surely there are pressures but it's a privilege hypothesis used to write the piece so the objection is important.
Once you achieve notoriety the world changes around you. Not only that but by the time achieve notoriety the world already changed around you. The lead time to novel prize is high.
Just to be concrete about one way the world changes is that you're no longer a great student with time to while away. Now everybody wants to congratulate you and learn your theory from you. They won't leave you the f** alone. When you were just some random promising grad student, you had mental quiet and peace. Academia, industries, responsibilities, they take that away.
And let's be fair, if you've done Nobel worthy work, then you've contributed enough that you deserve to just slack off and be left in peace for the rest of your life.
The epiphany for me this week was a long list of rabbit holes from this long post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324054
https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD638...
https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2021/06/i-went-to-d...
https://6826.csail.mit.edu/2020/papers/noproof.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948767
Now I have no illusions about who looked stupid and who were stupid. It really doesn’t matter.
The jury is still out.
> Now I have no illusions about who looked stupid and who were stupid.
Could you expand on what you mean?
Stupid/smart are social construct and illusions.
The reality is different.
The most valuable debugging skill I learned in 15 years: asking "dumb" questions out loud. Last month I spent 3 hours chasing a race condition that disappeared the moment I explained the code to a junior dev who asked "why are we using a global here?" The willingness to look stupid just saved us from shipping a critical bug.
While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I also wonder how much his 'data' about Nobel Prize winners and Institute of Princeton grads actually holds up vs how much of it is just very expected regression to the mean. He talks about Shannon; at some point Shannon was always going to have his last great idea. Given that the idea that made him famous was his greatest, you wouldn't expect many other ideas like that just from normal variation.
Essentially, if you take scientific ideas, including Nobel Prize ideas, and put them all on a bell curve of how difficult it is to find them, you wouldn't expect the same person to have multiple ideas all the way on the right, even if they are very above average.
I see it as more of a function of age/experience.
Whey you are young and inexperienced, you don't know enough to know somethig is a "bad" idea.
When you are older and experienced, you've seen a lot of bad ideas and you worry about it because you don't want to look bad among your peers.
When you are much older, you don't give a shit. You know that none of it really matters and when you are dead nobody is going to be talking about all the bad ideas you had.
People in their 20s care way too much about reputation and ego - as did I when I was in my 20s. So much that it's paralyzing. It will prevent them from saying or doing the things they really need to say and do.
On top of fear of looking stupid, my bigger concern is lack of novelty in my work. Seems like any idea I have for a blog post or book, or any photo I'm planning has already been explored in depths by someone else. I know the joy is in the process mostly, not the result. But doing something while knowing it is certainly not original make it really hard.
It probably has. It's super difficult to be truly unique in a world where billions have learned to read and write. It doesn't matter however. The people who see your work haven't seen/read everything out there. You can be unique for them.
You shouldn't disregard that even when you have the same intent as someone else, you work your way to get there, and that's usually more than enough to build a distinction.
I have a principle similar to this. The First Idiot Principle: never be afraid to be the first idiot in the room. Usually others have the same reservations you do about sharing.
If you want to hear more I wrote a small post.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-first-idiot-principle
I have no problem being the first, it's that I'm also the ~3rd, ~9th, ~24th and then they realize, wait, he's not a creative genius at all, we hired a total fucking retard!
Just when they give up on you hit em with a masterpiece.
You can roil economies by acting like this.
Looks like a fresh take on the topic.
But I was reminded immediately of this Dan Luu post with the same title.
https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
Gonna be a bit controversial here, and say that sometimes the opposite can happen. That someone becoming successful can give them the confidence to share ideas they wouldn't have shared otherwise, and give ideas that people would have otherwise written off as 'ridiculous' a level of extra credibility in the process.
And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ideas put forward by successful companies and business people (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else) would never get off the ground if put forward by a random individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that make the world better off.
At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything, popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.
So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it can equally make you more likely to try them since your status gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to tell you no.
A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever on the cake but couldn’t really think of anything. We stood around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones." And it worked!
It's a well known creative / brainstorming trick that the best way to have a lot of good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.
Focus on genesis decoupled from critique, then critique later.
I've never been afraid to share bad ideas because the best way to get to a good one is to go through the bad ones. Sometimes my bad ideas will spark a good idea from somebody else or sometimes it even turns out that my bad idea isn't bad at all and people like it and we end up adopting it.
Either way, not being afraid to look dumb keeps the juices flowing. And keeps the conversation going. Or sometimes it starts the conversation that nobody else is willing to start.
> Just this: are you willing to look stupid today? That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
That’s always been one of my strengths. I used to ask questions in classes, that would have the teacher look at me, like I was a dunce, and the rest of the students in stitches. It has always been important for me to completely understand whatever I’m learning. I can’t deal with “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” I have to really know why; not just what.
By the end of the class, the other students would be asking me for help, and no one was laughing at me. I tended to get good grades.
The worst teacher that I ever had, was a genius mathematician, who shut me down, when I did that. It was the only incomplete that I ever had. The best teachers would wince, but treat the question as a serious one.
One of the really nice things about using an LLM, is not having to deal with sneering.
> The writing isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely not good enough to publish.
Ira Glass has a nice quote which is worth printing out and hanging on your wall
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Or if you're into design thinking, the Cult-of-Done[1] was a decade ago.
[1] - https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...
That's the exact opposite of OP's issue, right? He was producing, and it was good, but somewhere along the way he developed good taste (or some facsimile). Ira is claiming that people who are creative beginners start with good taste, which doesn't seem to be the case for a lot of us.
> The overwhelming majority of mutations end up being harmful or neutral. An exceedingly small fraction are beneficial.
Neutral drift is perhaps the most important part of evolution. It's how you preserve diversity over time and avoid getting stuck in holes in the fitness landscape.
If we only ever made steps that improved performance we'd inevitably see premature convergence. The neutral drift can overpower progress toward a global minimum, but it's a lot better to be going in circles than to not be moving at all. Diversity collapse is the worst thing that can happen to an evolutionary algorithm. You must reject superior solutions with some probability in order to make it to the next step. You can always change your selection pressure. You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.
> “You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.”
Assuming there’s no Deity or similar outside power seeding the initial system with information that can only be lost and never gained, then any information in the evolutionary system got there by some process that happened once, and presumably can happen again and fix (rediscover) the lost information?
Good advice to the younger folks. You can afford to look stupid. So go ahead and do that thing you wanted to try. There's more acceptance because of your age. You're expected to fail in some ways.
Once you have a mortgage, a reputation to maintain, an image of competence to uphold at work, you pretty much can't afford to look stupid in my opinion.
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist and MIT professor, is known for his "provocative ideas" and has a self-imposed rule regarding his work: "Every time I've written ten mainstream papers, I allow myself to indulge in writing one wacky one". This approach allows him to pursue unconventional, "crazy" theories without jeopardizing his reputation as a serious scientist.
Intelligence and ignorance are two different things. It is a sign of intelligence to be able to acknowledge your ignorance when it exists. Then you use your intelligence to correct that. Even with a mortgage this has never failed me. 20 years, 2 employers due to an ownership change, and several RIFs survived.
The power of saying, "I don't know, but I will find out" is underestimated.
Trump and Elon still afford to look stupid, you can do it your whole life.
There's a huge 'Emperor's New Clothes' vibe going on with those two.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes
yep; happened to me, too;
I just feel that having fun doing what you're (becoming) good at should never be ruined by extra pressure from other people or even from yourself.
There’s different levels to stupidity as well, coming up with a “bad” idea, writing a very brief prototype of it, and presenting it to a senior for feedback is one level that is typically harmless. Coming up with a “bad” idea, going skunkworks on it and when you think you have something demoing it to many seniors and managers and showing them you’ve been working out of scope for a month on a bad side project that doesn’t work while the rest of the team is burdened in tasks is another much higher level
This reminded me of this essay by Isaac Asimov on creativity
https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/10/20/169899/isaac-asi...
I enjoyed this read. Thank you for sharing!
I don’t mind looking stupid. It’s actually an important part of my identity - I lay my humanity bare. I am of flesh after all.
I’m starting to suspect that it’s making it more difficult for me to land a job though. I don’t know. There’s something about it. It’s almost as if businesses aren’t hiring human beings, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
When I seen the title I thought it's https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
If anyone is interested in the topic, definitely need to check https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
It's a numbers game in the end. Law of large numbers at play again. The noise drops with more tries.
I suppose the corporate culture thinking is exactly opposite to this with metrics like efficiency, productivity etc. You cannot afford to try a lot and look stupider.
Efficiency, metrics, and willingness to look stupid works when nobody has much future power over you. If you can just refresh to a new pool, that is fine but if it is the same pool, it has consequences.
I was on an interview panel for a role and a guy lost out on the role because about 18 months prior, he had asked too many questions one time and because of that the PM thought he struggled to grasp concepts.
One meeting did in his promo.
> One meeting did in his promo.
Although true, I feel it's worth adding here that the problem is that PM. While looking stupid by asking questions can "do you in" when working with incompetent managers like that, I'd argue that most managers will look at results -- and asking dumb questions can lead to much better results compared to just staying quiet and hoping for the best.
dude's RSS feeds return 404
"The biggest things in life have been achieved by people who, at the start, we would have judged crazy. And yet if they had not had these crazy ideas the world would have been more stupid." - Arsène Wenger
I found it gets easier as you get older. Somehow I care much less what others think
I find it incredibly easy on people and processes my life does not depend on being the way it is. I find it incredibly annoying and unconfortable when around people and processes my life depends on.
A willingness to look stupid is a core requirement for learning languages. I look stupid everyday.
I actually don't like this statement. I'd rephrase it because trying to speak in a language doesn't make you look stupid, or at least it shouldn't. Saying "I look stupid everyday" just reinforces that there is something inherently stupid about not knowing a language and trying to learn it. If anything trying to learn a language when it's not a requirement for something, is really anything but stupid.
Whether you like it or not you will look stupid to native speakers. It's a subconscious bias
Idk if that's universal, when I run into people who struggle with English or just don't know it my first thought has never been this is a stupid person.
"Looking stupid" and "being a stupid person", or even "coming off as a stupid person" are not the same things.
No, it does. Even if the audience knows that your English or other languages is perfectly professional, speaking Chinese at a lower level does leave a certain negative impression.
I think the phrasing is fine. It's self-aware. It acknowledges that stupidity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
"Looking stupid" is not the same as "being stupid." It could be very smart indeed, depending on your circumstances, to learn an additional language, and the point being made is that when going out in public and speaking it in front of native speakers, ridicule is not unexpected, and should be embraced.
True. When we were in Italy, my wife couldn't say a single phrase in Italian because she was afraid she might make a mistake. I knew not making one would be impossible, so I just geared down to "barbarian" to get my point across.
"Good morning. Tickets destination Grossetto, please. Two adults, one child. Six years. Yes, return. Card acceptable? Thank you."
YES! happens to me all the time in things big and small. At work, at home, with the kids, my wife, and their birthday presents. I once talked to a somewhat famous writer who told me this very thing. He said his worst critic was his inner demon biting him at every thought, every phrase, questioning his wording, waiting for the greatest possible idea, discarding all that was not breathtaking enough.
Why do we have to be great all the time? Who is telling us to be best? And i know that in writing this i am pruning myself again trying to find the best words here.
Imagine that: i want enough points for karma to be able to post here my greatest idea. Which ironically enough, is the best greatest idea i had in a loooong time, and the moment i want to share it i must wait to be found good enough and worth to be heard.
I guess the only thing we can do is to disconnect our feeling of self worth from outside signals and be happy with the little things that made us smile when we did not know nor care about other peoples opinions.
Young people care what others think of them.
Middle age people don't care what others think of them.
Old people know nobody thinks about them.
This reminds me of "McDonald's Theory": https://jonbell.medium.com/mcdonalds-theory-9216e1c9da7d
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid. I’ve spent a long time thinking about what this reason could be. The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile, and by not sharing any work at all, we never have to risk our egos being damaged. If we never share anything, then nothing bad can ever happen to us. But the flip side to protecting our egos is that we never end up making anything worthwhile.
This seems oversimplified, since there's a second, unmentioned possibility that somebody doesn't share an idea:
In a capitalist society, people sense there could be monetary potential with their idea, so they sit on it quietly (often never getting around to developing it, etc).
This fear has been amplified in recent years with AI vacuuming up everybody's intellectual property with zero reward. Can't really blame people for doing nothing in such conditions.
And for the commenters complaining about "low/high trust societies," they ought to consider factoring the above into their definition.
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's the prevalence of AI-generated text on the Internet now, but I feel more motivated to just... type stuff out and post it now without giving it too much thought (where previously I would overthink things.) Could be all the Claude Code prompting I've been doing too? Not sure.
I feel more motivated to write now because a "badly" written text made by a human to me is always better than a "perfect" text completely made by AI. Everyone has their own way of writing. Embracing that in these times is something to find motivation in.
- Could be a much higher prevalence of badly written AI-generated articles, awful AI slop code etc - you know you can do better
- Could be the opposite, the fact that a lot of what is AI-generated is well polished, at least on a surface - your raw input is distinguishable as a human and rated higher by yourself or others
- Could be the motivation to try to keep internet human-made even if it seems like a lost fight
- Could be the fact that people overall take less effort to write things as you can always polish it up with AI - some decide not to do that and still post it - you feel safer doing the same
The trouble is that no one has a cogent definition of creativity. Without that, how would you even know whether you are being creative or not?
Or is it like "I'll know it when it see it" smut?
I would have loved for the author to cover the 3rd category - people whose ego doesn't let them post anything even before they're known. Everyone in small towns and cities already feels "known" and exposed vs living in big cities like NYC.
I like this post, and reality is of course more nuanced. You can read it between the lines of this article as well: by taking smaller more frquent steps (posting more regularly in context of the article) you can recover faster and and try more ideas in a short amount of time. I guess this is also what a lot of modern development methodologies and start-up mentality rely on too, so I hardly think I'm sharing something new. Still, if you have the option to make your attempt smaller it's generally worth it.
Of course you still have to take the plunge no matter how small.
Realistically it’s just audience capture. Happens to everyone. Guy makes one hit tweet. He becomes that tweet guy. Always trying to recapture.
I like to think that my blog is mostly for my daughter to read and think to herself “oh that’s who dad was”. And secondarily for AI. That helps.
> I keep thinking about the version of me from a few years ago. He was worse at almost everything. Worse writer, worse thinker, worse at making things. Nobody really knew him and nobody really cared what he had to say. And yet he had so much more courage.
I would not agree that that earlier version had necessarily more courage. If no one cared than the associated risk is also lower, and thus less courage needed.
I overall agree with how important the courage to do stuff that might make you look stupid is, though.
I don't think we ever escape the desire to avoid looking bad - we just recontextualize it. For instance the article is basically making a short vs long term argument - in the short term you might look foolish, but as a result you might produce something of value (which in the long term will make you look fantastic).
So personally I prefer to frame these things that way - it's not that we should want to look foolish for its own sake (obviously), it's that part of getting anywhere in life is taking some risks and developing your threshold for doing so.
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid ... The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile
I disagree with this, at least in how it regards ego as pointless.
Humans are tuned to win a delicate social competition by becoming popular and therefore having a bunch of kids with other popular (and therefore reproductively successful) people. The most plausible explanation is that our ancestors have been through millions of years of evolutionary selection to try to become the most popular in a social group by taking risks, but then cease all risk-taking and guard their position after they get there.
Ego is the mechanism by which this happens, but it's there for a reason. Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human connection. We haven't always lived in societies which are so open to failure, experimentation, or looking stupid.
Somehow, it always triggers my skepticism when supposedly sociobiological or evolutionary anthropological or evolutionary psychological arguments are brought up. My suspicion is that it is far too easy to simply pack in the story you want to have in there. I can think of dozens of objections to your description. For example, in small groups, the social game in terms of status may not be that complex, and the choice for pairings may be very limited.
I'll leave it at that because I don't want to write a novel. But when I look at your description, I don't see any plausibility at all. I only see projections. Like in The Flintstones or in old movies about Stone Age people, who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today. What I mean is: the social dynamics you're assuming here may be primarily shaped by your experiences in the present and are far from as universal as you believe.
Fair enough, but if you remove the evo psych explanation you're still left with "people don't want to look stupid in front of their peers because it might have consequences". This seems plausible to me regardless.
I've never encountered a person who was attracted to a stupid person.
BTW, the Flintstones is just The Honeymooners without Jackie Gleason. One could also argue that Family Guy and The Simpsons are also reboots of The Honeymooners.
> who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today
"They're the modern stone age family" are the words in the Flintstones' theme song.
Never heard of "bimbos"/"himbos"?
Even in small groups, being respected and considered valuable is important? I'm not sure what you mean here.
I take your point, and I too get triggered when people invoke mate selection and dopamine. I could be with you in being skeptical about that specific angle... but absolutely if you look at lawless or less institutionalized cultures, there is a trend towards appearing strong/tough and hiding any weaknesses
Can we ascribe it all to ego, I wonder, or is it just one of several mechanics at play, albeit an important one. A Dutch saying is that there's a lid for every pot ("op elk potje past een dekseltje") i.e. that the most unlikely people still manage to find a partner and form a family. That very clumsy person who stutters, and is perceived by an ego-driven person as "a loser" still finds someone who thinks they are adorable and attractive.
Maybe not adorable and attractive, but just enough to settle for.
At work I dare to look stupid and in my friend group too. It hasn’t always led to a good outcome since people simply believe you’re actually stupid and the problem with that is that they don’t take you seriously enough. Now, you can say: their loss. But man, I need to eat. With friends, sure. At work? After years of looking stupid, I had enough of it.
Also finding a partner is mostly about being silly with each other. So looking a bit stupid is a plus there and had no issues about it on that front
Being silly is not being stupid. Being stupid is investing in lottery tickets, driving drunk, etc.
Not sure if this is the right place to respond, but I’ve only seen this play in situations where people visibly want to look better than others, because they feel insecure about their status.
Frankly, I have no idea how to explain it in words, but when you’re in a setting where everyone knows they’re good at their own thing, but also know the others are also exceptional at their thing, this game goes away. Like it actually becomes the opposite. Everyone calls themselves stupid, become more cordial, and things get fun. Trying to not to look stupid signals negative status, or whatever you call it.
It’s very funny to write this out, because I’ve never thought about it on purpose. Everything has just felt natural at the time of the event.
>> Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human connection.
You dont want to do dumb things that might get you in jail and have rveryone shun you.
But should u be so afraid of brusing your ego that you shy away from: starting a business (if u have the financial means), asking someone out, publishing something in public, etc
Sometimes evolution overshoots, esp when our environment changes
The actual most plausible explanation becomes clear when you rearrange the words into the right order: "There might be a good reason why people who want to avoid looking stupid are smart ..." Forcing oneself to become smart is the only escape from looking stupid.
"The people I think are smart are those that try to look smart", that is the most plausible. There are probably many smart people who aren't afraid of looking stupid that you think are stupid for that reason.
Personally I dislike people who never say stupid things, because they are focusing too much on appearances and too little on trying to figure things out.
> "The people I think are smart are those that try to look smart", that is the most plausible.
The story does not appear to define smart as "not looking stupid", rather something more towards "mastered the creative process".
There is only so much time in the day. An hour spent in interaction where you might look stupid is an hour not spent directly working on your craft. The most plausible explanation is that those who don't want to look stupid turn towards becoming smart as the escape. As in, a tendency to use time spent alone locked up in a room learning how to use a new tool instead of galavanting at an art show is what makes them become smart.
I agree with the popular thing, but only up to a point, for a certain type of people, or from a certain age on (for me this latter case holds true), competing against other people just isn't a valid concern anymore, the societal "recognition" stops being a thing.
In my case, and I suppose this holds true for others, too, the "fiercest" competition is with one's inner-self or, at the very most, with past/dead/way-out-of-line-of-sight "competitors" that have nothing to do with current society and its recognition. I know that this "competing against one-self" sounds trite, but, again, this is how things are for some of us.
This is true. It's okay to overshare and look stupid.
I am immune to this as I will never be "great" at anything. I am average, and I am OK with that.
Reminds me of the Dan Luu article from a few years ago: https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
This is also what's called the beginner's mind, Shoshin. [0] One of the core concepts of Zen Buddhism. Tangentially related would be the concept of no-mind, Mushin. [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-mind
Ward said it succinctly, as was his wont: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
The fear of looking stupid is basically a false positive machine. It optimizes so hard for not being wrong (type I error?) that it rejects way more ideas than it should. And most of the time the "that I'll look dumb" signal is just noise - nobody actually cares or even notices. You're always standing on the safe side of a threshold that's set way too conservatively.
Reading this makes me think of the effect of doing something you do all the time, and are pretty great at, but when someone is watching you, you inevitably make a stupid mistake.
It also makes me think of certain people that attain the level of fame where everything they do is praised, whether it is objectively good or not.
The hardest version of this in engineering is asking "why does this work?" after something is already running. Everyone assumes someone else understood it when they built it. Often nobody did.
What has potential AGI teached me is that no matter what I write, as long as I do it manually, it has value. Not because it is good but because it is genuine.
Before LLMs I would never think that what I have to say is valuable in any way. Now I realize my every comment, my every human input to the global internet and society is infinitely more valuable than ai slop.
This has really given me a jolt I needed and confidence to freely voice anything anywhere knowing that I make a difference against the flood of auto generated soulless garbage.
Flaws in human writing aren’t an issue, they are the very feature I look for. These exaggerations, hyperboles, emotions. It’s all unmistakably human.
Even 4chan is an oasis of humanity in that way. Indeed it is bristling with genuine creativity despite its sole ingredient is 100% human flaws. No preservatives, no artificial sweeteners.
Holy shit I really wrote it quite fun, I encourage everyone to do the same have some fun writing because each one of us is now highly valued artist in a flood of ai slop literally no matter what you type I want to read your flawed shit.
It’s actually a blessing when people don’t have huge expectations of you. The higher their expectations get, the more your stress increases and your productivity drops. Forever the underdog :)
I really liked this article, thanks Samin
Never make it to management that way. Other people have to do the failing.
I have very little pride or shame.
It's a superpower.
Look like an idiot and you'll learn the fastest!
Been out here lookin stupid since before I wasn’t and yet very few upvotes. Whst does that tell you?
My burner account here, I be stupid so I learn
It's true that a Nobel prize can blunt a scientist's productivity, but for balance, the kind of extraordinary result that merits a Nobel might also not be replicable in one scientist's career, regardless of how the world reacts to it.
We would need to compare career trajectories of productive scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's ability to function.
But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider António Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949 Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy, eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they lived through the procedure.
Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so profusely for his breakthrough procedure?
Queue obligatory Weird Al: https://youtu.be/SMhwddNQSWQ
I'm human so I'm certainly not immune to social anxiety or embarrassment from looking stupid, but I have been trying to do a manual override that for the last year.
Something it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize is that the first draft of nearly everything I do is bad. The first draft of my code is usually bad, the first draft of an essay I write is usually bad, the first version of something I draw is usually bad. If I don't allow myself to look stupid, even if only for the first draft of something, then I'll never accomplish anything. Doing something crappy is a means to doing something not-crappy.
I don't think I'm alone with this. There appears to be some ambiguity on who actually first said this, but there's an adage of "There's no great writing, only good rewriting".
It's "Cue", rather than "Queue".
You are right. My comprehension of words isn’t always the best :)
Just a few sentences in and the author is already comparing himself to nobel prize winners. Love it! Nice article!
It is probably the most difficult and the most important life skill you need to develop
See also: https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
What a genuine read. And it is kinda the whole reason why i started blogging (shameless plug: stupid-ideas.com). You never git gud if you never start. And you innevitably look stupid to some people when starting.
The best teams are the ones where “stupid” questions are always alowed.
The worst ones are the teams where members treat everyone as stupid
The absolute best will generate a creative discussion around a “stupid” question.
The absolute worst will deliberately mislead collegues to make them look stupid.
"There’s this unfortunate pattern that happens when someone wins a Nobel Prize. They tend to stop doing great work."
That is as true of literature as of science. It is not just some curse, but rather because they tend to get recognised after their peak anyway.
Definitely needed to succeed in theater and take risks in life.
I think I was 35 when I first said to myself: "When you don't understand something, it's either because it's difficult, or because you don't have all information you need yet."
Being able to think this (and really feel it) was a big step for me. I think objectively I was always quite smart and also highly educated but I still felt like an imposter. It's nice when you finally feel that trust in yourself. And indeed I probably sometimes look stupid, but I think I often come back quickly in smart ways afterwards anyway, so I don't care so much about it.
Need someone to look stupid for me, $100/hr.
Court jester?
There is sibling concept of the Nobel prize winner ending up doing less meaningful work after they received their price. In history there are countless examples of the underdog emerging from the shadows and the dominant empire collapsing under its own weight; a natural rotation of roles. It is explained in detail here: https://youtu.be/ybufqRY77PQ
Great article.
I've observed this behavior at work. It doesn't present itself only as not sharing. People with recognition and political leverage can share wrong ideas confidently, and others will naturally follow them. If they're challenged on that idea, and even presented evidence that it's wrong, they often push back and double down on it, or don't acknowledge the correction at all.
I think this is more detrimental to the team and organization than the fear of sharing the wrong idea. For some reason, some senior people will do anything to avoid losing face in public, yet they still seek recognition for their work.
On the other hand, it is a real pleasure to work with senior people who can acknowledge their mistakes, are willing to learn from them, and course correct if needed. It shows maturity and humility, and sets a good example for others, which is exactly what good leaders should do.
> So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just... stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than producing nothing at all.
"Loosening up" is a way to describe this skill.
It reminds me of a story from Richard Feynman. In his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he recalls an art class when he was instructed to draw without looking at the paper. The first time he did it, his pencil broke at the very beginning and he had nothing but impressions in his paper.
The second time he did it, he was impressed with the results, noticing a “funny, semi-Picasso like strength” in his work.
He knew that it would be impossible to draw well without looking at the paper, so he didn’t consciously try. He writes, “I had thought that ‘loosen up’ meant ‘make sloppy drawings,’ but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.”
Being allowed to fail is a condition for your mind to want to try new ideas. I elaborate on this here in my book, Creative Doing: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/relinquis...
There is a lot I like about this post, including the author's intuition to invoke the jellyfish.
A lion’s mane jellyfish can release up to 45,000 eggs per day. The jellyfish’s strategy is to lay as many eggs as possible and leave them to fend for themselves. Most of these eggs don’t survive, probably fewer than 0.1%.
Compare this with an elephant, which can only give birth to one calf at a time. The elephant’s strategy is to dedicate its effort into raising a relatively small number of calves. Many of these calves survive to see adulthood. This approach might sound familiar because it’s how we raise our kids as well.
If you're feeling stuck, and unwilling to look stupid, maybe it's time to approach your creative ideas less like an elephant and more like a jellyfish. I write more about this here: https://herbertlui.net/the-jellyfish-knows-how-to-survive-un...
The advantage to writing a blog, nowadays, is because your writing will be so difficult hard to discover, you can put all your ideas out there—good and bad—and only become known for the good ones. (That's what I'm hoping to do!)
In other words, "Publish everything, promote selectively" (Elaborated on this here: https://herbertlui.net/publish-everything-promote-selectivel...)
I'm a nearly 40 year old man and I skip through the halls at work most days. It's something I've been doing for a long time because it's fun, it's faster than walking, and it looks silly. It seems to help some people loosen up when they see their colleague skipping down the hall and I think that helps team morale.
Caring if you get downvoted makes your posts dull.
Somehow sometimes it's not so easy, for me at least. Not that i care about the number, but more that it wasn't beneficial or i offended someone.
Measured. If what you are saying is being downvoted this group might not be ready for it.
Saying something like Claude is over rated as a general llm because of loftly guardrails will get downvotes today but seen as insightful down the road. You can be too early or late.
Take Tailwinds. Is it loved or hated now? We went through different phases.
I don’t even consider assigning a numerical score to a post meaningful. Downvoting is for trash posts that we all agree are trash, like the weirdos who write angry insults or the AI spam, not a quantitative metric. When applied to honest commentary it feels like twelve year olds yelling shut up at you.
It's been very interesting to see what does and doesn't get downvoted. A couple of people didn't like me pointing out the reality of STIs for example although no one really wants to get one.
> Overshare, but look stupid
I am definitely positioning myself in this category, even here in HN discussions, I prefer to do so rather than overthinking and undersharing. The reason was because few years ago I had an interview, and the company saw my portfolio and the work I did and they were overhyped about having me, they gave me 5 stars service to get me to the company HQ for the interview, but in real life I am too humble and not much of an over seller of myself, so the bar they had about me was waaay higher than how I was IRL, and got rejected haha, it was brutal rejection because I really wanted to work there and they evaluated me based on the few hours interaction rather than what I am able to do. Since then I try to keep the bar low early on and take it from there.
It’s not only a moat but a filter.
It tells me immediately up front if they’re a retard in competition with me or a retard I can work with.
“Fragile ego” is such a tired trope. It is certainly a factor, but its effects are way overestimated. Something about “fragile ego” seems to stop people from thinking any further.
“Looking stupid” has an obvious downside. Just restate it as “proven incompetent.” If you are proven incompetent within your social group, you lose your power. Loss of power has terrible consequences! Duh!
When someone blames fragile ego, which is equivalent to saying “fear of losing self-respect” but ignores “being ostracized from access to resources and influence by people you depend upon and respect” I might conclude that I should ignore what that person thinks, because maybe they have a thinking impairment. (See how that works?)
Young people are not trying things because they are fearless, nor do they have bullet-proof egos, they are trying things because they really are stupid (in a gentle manner of speaking). They don’t know as much as they will know. Also, they know they have no social status and they must take risks to prove themselves.
Finally, they do it because they have nothing else to do and nothing else to protect.
Human society is too stifled by expectations of how every should behave, from the people who raise you and you grow up with and shows and movies, so much that we try to match that and be happy/sad/angry/prim/proper/etc. at times even when we don't really feel that way.
"Failure is the mother of success."
A certain president?
However had, at any level, people may look stupid for doing something that was not clever. I don't think even very smart people are 100% of the time very clever.
Nice work
In this comment I'll use the words useless and "useless". The former's definition is the one we are most familiar with, while the latter, in quotation marks, is the literal definition if you break the word useless into its two components: use + less. So we have of no use whatsoever and of less use. Reminder: I am not using these words as insults, but rather neutrally. Also, I am using the general "you" here, similar to using "one", rather than referring to the reader or the author of the article in specific.
The problem with this article is that you're telling yourself you're not afraid of stupidity, which in this case is synonymous to incompetence or uselessness, yet your endgoal betrays otherwise. You're presenting a bunch of ideas that are 'useless' hoping amongst them is one of more use, hoping it all ties together and produces a wonderful result, as you get to yell "eureka". You do not want to accept uselessness, but to set your expectations of yourself, that either you or another person or persons have imposed, lower, back to where they once were. Or even lower. The reason your or another's expectations of you have risen after becoming older, as many comments have also wrote, is because your effort is being externally recognized by others, either by a Nobel price or a promotion. Regardless, your issue is self-esteem related. To combat lower(ing) self-esteem or insecurity, (and even accept uselessness!), you must love yourself.
Now a question: have you ever loved someone you didn't know at all? I don't mean in the physical sort of attraction, I mean someone that you knew nothing about whatsoever, not even how they look or act. It's impossible, isn't it? It is those we know the best that we feel love for, is it not? Now consider what the opposite of insecurity is. Security in one’s abilities and self, knowledge of one's limits as well as one's capabilities, and an acceptance of who one is. The more one grows, the more they change, so it is possible to know oneself and then not, as it is also possible the view others have make one to muddle their own perception. You won't find confident people who aren't aware of their own abilities or cannot accurately access what tools they have at their disposal. Confidence in abilities one doesn't have is not confidence, but overconfidence, and overconfidence is false confidence, which is as maladaptive as insecurity. I'll focus on those with low self esteem, because you fall into that category; these people are aware of their shortcomings or their potential shortcomings, their 'uselessness', because the higher you are the easier it is to fall, perhaps even inflate how many shortcomings they have. When you accept your "uselessness" you may produce some bad ideas, a few good ones, but in the end the fact that you're ok with it it makes you feel less distress about yourself, does it not?
Tie these together; you cannot love someone you do not know, and people who love themselves know their limits and what they can achieve, to be insecure is to misjudge your achievements, so because of this I assume, could be wrong, you do not love yourself enough. And watch, I said "enough", because knowing oneself completely is impossible. Similar to how reaching the truth is impossible, but becoming less wrong isn't.
Now uselessness. No one likes being bad at something; even babies are afraid of failure. I do not remember my time as a baby, but I remember being frustrated when I couldn't do certain things, like reaching a high place, as a toddler. Perhaps one of the reasons babies cry is because they cannot move their legs by their will. "Uselessness" can be overcome, but sometimes one may be actually useless and never learn how to walk. Does it sting, being called useless? I don't mean it as an insult here. I am using the literal definition of the word; complete inability to do something, rather than partial/subpar. It stings because it has been instilled on one that incompetence is negative, and thus something that should not be a part of you, a flaw needing purification. But if incompetence didn't exist, neither would competence, similarly to how life wouldn't be valuable without death or happiness without sadness.
However I like the gist and the thought behind this article.
Overall, I think acceptance that one might be unable to do certain things, can make one's life easier. The bad ideas you produce are as much of a part of you as your good ones. And accepting both is crucial.
Bears look smart, bulls do things
Let's see a bull open a very complicated garbage dumpster in a national park. Maybe bears are actually smart and not just looking smart?
> Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
I think they are probably referring to marketplace bears and bulls.
It's a horrendous example.
Bears are the same thing as bulls. Just the opposite.
You can look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler, being a bull, buying puts.
You can equally look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler, being a gay bear, shorting the stock.
The "beauty" of our modern stock market, is it provides both sides the avenue to lose stupid amounts of money.
I would think that bears are much smarter than bulls?
AI has no ego
AI also has no intelligence
Depends on your definition of intelligence.
Are you sure?
...but is specifically reinforced into generating text that satisfies the humans training it, and therefore is innately predisposed towards approval-seeking generations.